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INTERVIEW WITH RICK LEMON
BY MARK MADISON JUNE 30, 2004
NCTC, SHEPHERDSTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA
DR. MADISON: Today in June 30, 2004 and we are in Shepherdstown, WV doing an
oral history with Rick Lemon, the interview is Mark Madison. The first question for you
Rick is; please describe your training background in the Peace Corps and in the FWS,
before NCTC.
MR. LEMON: Ever since I was in the Peace Corps in central Africa I’ve had an affinity
for training. I started out designing and running training programs for Peace Corps
volunteers once they left the States and came to central Africa. So it was the in-country
training; mostly fisheries training for people that came over there. When I came back to
the States and started to work for the FWS out in fish hatcheries, I used to continue to go
down to the southeast somewhere in the summer, on my own time, and so training for
Peace Corps. In this case it was training before they left the county. It was technical
fisheries training, usually down at the University of Auburn, or in Stuttgart, Arkansas at
our old warm water fish technology center down there. When I moved into the Federal
Aide program I went to work and starting to realize just by asking them, that what they
needed the most help in was really some training; some capacity building, some things
that a lot of different states needed. For instance like in land acquisition; how to do
conservation easements. This was twenty-five years ago when they were still fairly new.
I would put together, not where I had any expertise in the subject but just developing and
bringing in the people. That worked very well. Then, I was in the Department of the
Interior’s Departmental Development Management Program. It’s a one-year training
course that I was in, in Washington. While I was in there, the Director of FWS at the
time, Frank Dunkle decided that he didn’t want the FWS participating in the
Department’s program anymore. He wanted is own leadership development program for
the FWS. So he made a pronouncement that the FWS would no longer participate in the
Department program. We would have our own program. I went to his Special Assistant,
Marv Duncan whom I knew from having worked out in Denver with him. I asked him
what he was going to do about this new leadership program. He said, “I don’t know, I
don’t know anything about training”. I said, “I know just enough to be dangerous. Could
I take a shot at it?” He told me it was all mine. So I worked with the Fish and Wildlife
Foundation, with Whitney Tilt and Abe Messino at the time. We put together what
became the upper level Management Development Program for FWS. We ran that. I was
in other jobs. It was a collateral duty. I ran that for about five years.
DR. MADISON: What was the state of training in the FWS before NCTC?
MR. LEMON: We didn’t have a whole lot of training. I mean, the longstanding training
was the Fisheries Academy. The fisheries people had training going back actually to the
1950’s if not before. It was very well known. A lot of state people, through the training
would do fish health and fish culture training. There was also fish nutrition training.
They has quite a history but with a fairly limited slate of courses. Law Enforcement
people have always had training. That was done at FLETC, the Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center in Glencoe, GA. The Refuge Academy had also been
around for quite a while. They had two programs. There was a Refuge Academy and an
Advance Refuge Academy. There were other fits and starts. There was a little bit in
Ecological Services, but very little. There was a leadership program that they called the
“hermdippers”. I don’t even remember what it stands for any more. They ran that for a
few years but it kind of faded away. There was certainly not a comprehensive training
program in the FWS. What we had was fairly limited.
DR. MADISON: So how did the NCTC project get started?
MR. LEMON: Well, you’ll have to talk to some other people about and get in put from
people like Bill Maxin and Gary Edwards and Wendell Ogden and folks like that. When I
received the phone call. I was actually in doing the Upper Level Management
Development Program at the Xerox Center down in Leesburg. I was running that
program. I think it was Bob Putz and Dave Olsen who took me aside and said that it
looked like the FWS was going to building a training center. But they weren’t really sure
what it should look like, or who should be involved, or really anything else. They said
that there was some appropriations language that Senator Byrd put in the Bill in 1989
that went along the lines that there was some money to start the planning, development
and land acquisition for a FWS training center. The FWS should also consider design
options that would allow other organizations to use the center on a reimbursable basis.
There was also something in there about a fresh water aquarium; all to be built in the
Harper Ferry area.
DR. MADISON: What were the other possible sites you guys were considering? You
mentioned Harpers Ferry.
MR. LEMON: When I was brought on board, Bill Maxin took me out to an old quarry
site in Harpers Ferry. It was the Driggs property. It was quite an interesting site. It
really was an old quarry. In a way it was beautiful because there was some nice wooded
area up there, but it had this huge, three-eighths to a quarter of a mile quarry; which was
essentially a gash in the earth that was fairly deep. It was full of water and looked pretty
nice. But there were told mine tailings and railroad ties, buried there and there were some
other issues. The more we looked at the site, and brought in specialists to do contaminate
surveys what we found out was that there was a lot of industrial waste there. There
wasn’t much. I think there were some minor amounts of PCPs of something like that, but
not a lot. It was fairly contained, but there was still a lot of industrial waste there. It
would have taken a lot of clean up at that site to make it usable for a national
conservation-training center. Some of us were nervous enough about that site and the
contaminates on the site because of some of the history we’ve had in the FWS with Crab
Orchard and Tennicum and at other places where we got into something and then found
out how bad it really was. FWS had to spend a lot of money trying to clean it up. We
were nervous and started looking at some other sites. We even brought the Director, or
tried to bring the Director at the time, John Turner, out to look at the property. That’s a
funny story. The day he came out to get in his car, to drive out to Harpers Ferry that
morning, his car had been stolen out of his driveway. So John unfortunately didn’t make
it up. Dick Smith made it up and Mike Brennan and Bruce Blanchard who was my boss
at the time made it up. He was one of the two Deputy Directors. They looked at the
quarry site and looked around at some other sites as well. I have to say that against my
better judgment, a decision was made to move forward with the quarry site. We
proceeded with that and signed agreements with the landowner. Essentially, the
agreement said that as soon as you clean up this site to this certain level, we will acquire
the property. He started cleaning it up and started hauling things off and taking it to a
local landfill. The local landfill was shut down, not because of what he was bringing there,
but because of some past problems they had had and discovered in the landfill. When
that landfill closed down, his price of cleanup skyrocketed, because he would have had to
carry a lot of material for great distances. So he backed out of the deal and we were left
without a piece of property. We looked another site in Harpers Ferry that looked okay
at the time. Luckily it didn’t work out beside right now it’s in the middle of a housing
development and there are housing developments all around it. The fortunate thing was
that Bob Putz, who used to work for FWS and is retired right here in Shepherdstown,
WV. He worked at Leetown. He was the Director of the Leetown Science Center for a
long time. He is very close to Senator Byrd. He became the Assistant Director for
Refuges and Wildlife in Washington and then ended his career as Regional Director up in
Alaska. That was his last posting before he retired. Bob happened to know Mrs.
Hendricks, the owner of this site. They had worked together over at Shepherd College
years and years ago. Mrs. Hendricks just mentioned to Bob one time when she saw him
that she and her late husband, Charles Hendricks, had always thought that they would
love to keep this 538 acres intact and not have it sold off for a housing development. She
asked if he know of anyone that might be interested in the property for that kind of
purpose. Bob said, “Well, do we have a deal for you!” So we came out and luckily we
appraised the property. We included it in our NEPA documentation, but to be honest
with you it was kind of a throw away site at that point because we were still looking at
having to build some type of visitor attraction that would bring in a million visitors a
year. We couldn’t bring a million visitors a year down Shepherd Grade Road. This was
just too far off of the beaten path. We had it in there to kind of just to add another one in
there, and luckily we did. Because when the Driggs property fell down, and Harpers
Ferry went down we were still looking for another site. We were looking at the site that
is now in the middle of a housing development. Fortunately, I was at a County
Commission meeting and the press was there. I was reporting on where we stood on land
acquisition and design and everything else. I just mentioned that we were still looking for
a site. It was reported in the Shepherdstown Chronicle, the little local newspaper. Mrs.
Hendricks was living during the winter down at her daughter’s house in Arizona and had
the local Shepherdstown paper mailed to her out there. She read the quote that we were
still looking for a property. She called the FWS and said, “I didn’t know you still needed
a site. Make me an offer.” At that point, the visitor attraction had fallen through. We
said that we could offer her fair market value, but she had been offered a lot more money
than that in the past. She said, “If I was worried about the money, I would have sold it
long ago. Make me an offer.” Within thirty days, the FWS was in possession of this
property after having spent a good fourteen to sixteen months fooling around with land
acquisition down in Harpers Ferry. It was almost like it was meant to be. This is an ideal
site. Down there, any site we would have gotten, you would have heard highway 340,
because it’s a major highway. You could not get away from the road noise down there.
Plus, there were three working quarries down there. Here, we are so far off of the beaten
path that you don’t hear any traffic or any noise, just the birds. This is really an ideal
site.
DR. MADISON: Were there any other local sensibilities that you had to take into
account?
MR. LEMON: The thing that happened is that we had talking for so long about moving
into Harpers Ferry, everyone was aware of what we were doing down there. No one
really even knew that we were even looking at anything up here in Shepherdstown. It’s
not that we were hiding anything. It was just that we didn’t think we were going to be
here. So when we moved into this area, and moved in quickly, yeah, we were kind of
taking people by surprise. One of the best things I think we did was that we sat down
and gave it some thought and put together some strategy of how we were going to enter
the Shepherdstown community. I can still remember sitting down with Tom Davis and
Mary Lamen who is our neighbor across the street and also at that time, owned the
Shepherdstown Chronicle. We sat down with Mary and had breakfast down at the
Bavarian Inn and we talked about what was going on. We talked about the neighbors, the
community. And we talked about sensitivities in the community. We talked about who
we should working with and who we needed to reach out to. We asked Mary if we could
put an article in her paper, which she graciously approved. We helped to put that article
together, and it came out. I think that just to give a sense of where we were coming from
the headline of the article was We Want to be Good Neighbors, and it was all about how
we were building a training center. That was the approach we took from day one, even
when we were looking down in Harpers Ferry. We would always to the County
Commission meetings. The County Commission members I can remember saying, “You
all ought to be writing a book about how to enter a community because you are doing
everything right”. But to me and the others, it was just common sense; to Steve and Tom
and others. It was just common sense. You act like a neighbor. And especially with local
politicians, you don’t surprise them. You make sure that they know everything that’s
going on before their constituents get wind of what’s going on. When they get a phone
call from a constituent, they can say, “I know exactly what’s going on and this is what is
happening”. They can reassure them; and if nothing else they don’t look bad because
they are reading about things in the press. So we did that from day one. And I really
think it helped a lot. When we started construction out here, we tore Shepherd Grade
Road up! That road was never meant to handle the construction traffic that we brought
out on that road. There were literally ruts that were two feet deep. And there were part
of the road that had just crumbled and fallen off. But again, because we had worked so
hard with the neighbors, and we told them that the road would be improved and expanded
even; but not too much, because that’s what they wanted. We were not going to turn it
into a superhighway. But because exactly where we were and exactly when we would be
done and exactly when the road would be repaired and upgraded, they were willing to put
up with that for a while. I can remember having sessions down in Ann and Denny
Small’s basement. They are people who live down along the grade and are now part of
our Friends group. They were gracious enough to open up their home to us. We would
go in there with our flip charts and poster board, showing the center. We would just meet
with the neighbors and drink coffee and say that “this is what we’re going to do, and this
is what the buildings will look like, here’s where we’re going to put the entry road; we
could move it a little bit one way or the other if you’d like us to”. We even had Tom
Davis go over to Fort Detrick one day at lunch because one of our neighbors, the ones
that live right across from the entryway, he works at Fort Detrick. Tom drove over there
one day at lunch time just to lay out the plans with him and ask he was comfortable with
things like where the driveway was coming in. It was little things like that that I think
made a big difference with the neighbors. Sensitivities, yes, Shepherdstown is a very
sophisticated area. There are a lot of federal retirees out here and a lot of current federal
employees. There are a lot of professionals out in this area. Shepherd College also.
These people would have expected to be kept involved. And that’s what we did and
that’s the way we treated them. I think it’s been a very, very strong relationship ever
since.
DR. MADISON: So your cultural sensitivity training from the Peace Corps paid off?
MR. LEMON: Yeah! Maybe that was it! I don’t know! But like I said, it was common
sense to us. I have to admit too, and this is kind of a funny story, what may have helped
us a little bit too was that about the same time we were moving into this area, they were
talking about the CIA building a facility out around Charlestown. Of course, the CIA
can’t say, or confirm anything! So here we are laying out exactly what we’re doing and
what each building is going to look like and here’s where the road is coming in. The CIA
is saying, “No comment.” Compared to the CIA we looked really good! I think we did
the right thing and we did it for the right reason and it went very well.
DR. MADISON: You mentioned that Harpers Ferry was desirable because it was
accessible to traffic and so on. Do you want to talk a little about the National Habitat
Center plan?
MR. LEMON: Okay, I’m going to be brutally honest here. And this tape will not be
used against me. Senator Byrd had an interest in it obviously. And the Senator Byrd,
besides building the training center, which he was going to do to help the FWS. He was
also looking, as politicians do, to help the local community, his constituents. One of the
things was that the Harpers Ferry historical site is there. That brings people in for a three
or four hour stay, and they didn’t stay over night. They were looking for another anchor;
something else that would bring people to the area. They could go to the historical site
and then come to the aquarium or whatever else it was going to be. They’d spend the day
and it would get late and they would get hungry and decide to spend the night. It would
fill the hotels and restaurants and things like that. He asked us to look at the idea of an
aquarium. We did some feasibility studies. We went and visited aquaria around the
country; down in New Orleans, out at Monterey, and in Baltimore and up in
Massachusetts. When we came back we told the Senator that there were a lot of private
aquaria around the country and we weren’t sure that it made a lot of sense for the FWS to
be building one. As a matter of fact, we had a National Aquarium in the bottom of the
Commerce Building. So at that time, it didn’t make a lot of sense. But we went back to
him and said that if he’d consider something like a habitat center, we might be able to
draw the same number of people but the story we would be telling would be the story
about fish and wildlife habitat and why that’s important and how wildlife depends on
that. He said, “Okay, study that for a while and come back and we’ll talk about it some
more”. We studied that and worked with a firm to look at the feasibility of that. We laid
out some designs. We worked internally in the FWS with some of our environmental
educators. We came up with some plans and took them to the Director, John Turner. We
laid it out for John. We showed him what we’d do and how much it would cost. John
said, “That’s a lot of money!” We said, “We agree, sir, and if we had to choose we would
chose the training center.” That’s what the FWS really needed. John made arrangement
and we went up and visited with Senator Byrd with John Turner and Bruce Blanchard.
We kind of laid things out for the Senator and it was a lot of money, even to Senator
Byrd! He asked which of the two was most important to us and we told him that the
training center was really what we needed. He said that if this was our priority, that is
what would happen; to his credit. Then we went over and met with Mr. Yeates on the
House side of the House Appropriations Committee and went over the same things. This
is when it was decided to proceed just with the training center. At that point the
Shepherdstown site looked a lot better. Then we were able to start looking at this
property.
DR. MADISON: Just in a nutshell, what would the habitat center have looking like?
Would it have been like a biosphere?
MR. LEMON: You have it exactly right? It would have been biospheres. You would
walk into a desert habitat and see what kind of plant life and what kind of wildlife lives in
that habitat with the scarcity of water and things like that. You would walk into a
wetland area, or a prairie pothole, or a Pacific Northwest rainforest. It would be people
learning about the habitats of the United States and the wildlife that depends on that and
why habitat is important. That was the idea. If we were going to do something, that at
least was in keeping with the mission of the FWS, we thought, more than just an
aquarium.
DR. MADISON: We’ll let Disney build it in Animal Kingdom.
MR. LEMON: That’s right, we didn’t need to build it. Let somebody else build it!
DR. MADISON: What about the early design process for what became the training
center? How did that work?
MR. LEMON: It was a very interesting process, especially for us biologists, which most
of us were. We had some engineers on the job too. Essentially, what we did, and again, I
think this was one of the smart moves that we made, the Division of Engineering in
Denver with Sam Winnington and others, including Paul Camp and Marshall Wright
helped us find a firm of architects and architectural engineers to help us design this
project. As soon as that firm was selected, we sat down and started talking about what
we thought we were going to build and what it might look and what we were trying to do
with it. It was really a kind of scopeing and visioning process. One of the smartest
things we did was to go around a visit a lot of training and conference centers around the
country; public and private. We went to Pacific Gas and Electric out in California. We
went to the Postal Service facility our in Potomac, Maryland. We went to the top of the
line IBM training facility up in Palisades, New York. We went to some more commercial
conference centers in Denver and other places. We just went around and looked at the
classrooms, lodging accommodations, the dining halls, the gyms. We asked if there was a
swimming pool. Essentially, we asked what was working and what wasn’t working for
each of these places. The bottom line question was if they could do it all over again, what
would they have done differently in building these places. That really gave us the best
intelligence, or benchmarking, we call it today; about we should and shouldn’t do. We
learned from what other people had done and the mistakes they had made and things that
had been successful. The other thing that it did, because again, most of us were biologists;
we found out that the architects and the biologists were talking right by each other. We’d
say something and they’d say something and we’d both nod in agreement like we thought
we knew what each other was talking about and agreeing. Then we’d see something
written, or a sketch put together and say, “That’s not what we were talking about at all!”
So by going out and looking at these facilities, it was sort of like going out looking at
homes. If you go and look at enough homes, you can say that you like the combination of
the back yard from that one, basement from that one and the kitchen from that one.
That’s what we were able to do. We wanted the classroom design “…sort of like this
one here, with the large windows and the rear screen projection, but we really like the
lodging over here. And woe be to you if you ever design something like what we say over
here!” So it really helped us get on the same plane. And it worked out very well.
DR. MADISON: Did the architects get any information on the FWS to help them in the
process?
MR. LEMON: Absolutely. They did their history research. We sent them out to
refuges and hatcheries. They read about. They did a lot to learn about who they were
designing this facility for; FWS and other conservation professionals. So yeah, they were
very sensitive to that. But the great thing about the team that we had, by having the
architects who obviously knew their business, by having FWS engineers who knew their
business, and could translate between the architects and the biologists and by having the
biologists and the customers all involved and working very, very closely together for just
about a year and a half or more designing this place, then we’d get a set of plans back.
The first set of plans we got were for the Harpers Ferry site. We were that far along in
looking at things over there. We looked at the plans and said, “This isn’t it at all! These
buildings are all wrong!” Luckily they hadn’t gone too far with it. We went back and
rolled up our sleeves and sat down and said things like, “…the façade needs to look like
this.” Another excellent example is materials. We were talking about building materials
and we had a beautiful sketch of a beautiful building and it looked really nice. It had the
fieldstone like we wanted and had this other material up top. We asked what that was
and they said, “That would be wood.” We asked what kind of wood and the answer was,
“Pacific Red Cedar”. We came back with, “No, we don’t think so!” Here comes the
Spotted Owl! I could just see the picture and the article in the New York Times and the
Portland Oregonian about the FWS wiping out the remaining old growth forest in the
north west in order to building their training center! So there were sensitivities like that.
But again, the important thing was to be working very closely with them. We used
recycled steel for that and it worked out very well. It was a fascinating process for me, as
a biologist and I think it was a very good process for everyone all around. We all learned
from one another.
DR. MADISON: How did they settle on this aesthetic? You mentioned fieldstone and
steel roofs and those things.
MR. LEMON: There were a couple of things. We told them who our customer is. The
customers that would be coming here will be coming from national parks, national wildlife
refuges, fish hatcheries, the Forest Service; these are field folks who are coming here for
training. They are out of doors people, so build a place that speaks to them where they
will feel comfortable and they will feel at home here, ‘This is my home, I feel comfortable
here’. We took the designers over to Mrs. Hendricks’ house. We took them around and
walked through the house. We focused especially on the outside because the point we
were making there was that this house was at the time about two hundred and forty years
old. We felt that if this place can be this beautiful and this serviceable and be two
hundred and forty years old; if they do this that long ago, why is it that everything we
build today is falling down within forty years and looks terrible and is an embarrassment
to the organization? We’re never going to have the chance to do this over again. We need
to do it right the first time. We said that we wanted to do it right not for the people who
will come here today, but for the people who will be coming one hundred and fifty years
from now. Build it accordingly. We also told them to think about the Grand Lodges out
at Yellowstone and Yosemite. Think about that feel and the sense that you get it those
places because that’s where our people feel at home, and feel comfortable. So that was a
large part of the design. We wanted something that fit into this part of West Virginia; a
kind of rural landscape and vernacular with farm buildings, fieldstone, metal roofs, and
that type of things. I remember talking to them and saying that a word or two to describe
what I was looking for they would be “understated quality”. I wanted it to be quality
materials. I wanted it to last forever with little or no maintenance. But I didn’t want it to
be screaming in your face quality. I wanted it to be understated. So the use of the wood,
the fieldstone, the metal roofs all of those materials are very, very durable but they fit
well together. The architects did a fantastic job for us. That’s what we hear from our
customers. That’s what people tell us.
DR. MADISON: What were some of the training needs that had to be accommodated for
the design?
MR. LEMON: As far as training needs, everything in the FWS. Everything we did, we
needed training for. But as far as the design, we needed classrooms, well-designed
classrooms. We had all done enough training in hotel conference rooms and things like
that where you were afraid to tack something from the flip chart up on the wall, or tape
something on the wall. So we needed something that was a classroom. There is material
in these classrooms where you tack things up all around the room. But that it sound
absorbing and it also part of the sound system. That was part of the design. There are
little things like when we visited the Xerox Training Center; you would be in a classroom
and the backdoor of the classroom would open for somebody to go out to the restroom or
something, and there would be fifty people out in the hall taking a coffee break. Every
time that door would open this rush of sound would be coming in. It was very disruptive
to the instructor and to the students. All of our classrooms have a little vestibule; it’s
two doors. A lot of people other than trainers, people who are in the business will walk
in and say, “What’s with the two doors?” It makes a lot of sense, but it’s a small thing.
The rear screen projection systems are very important. I can remember going up to the
IBM facility in Palisades, New York. They took us in and showed us their classroom and
their AB system. This was high tech! It was so high tech that they had three IBM
engineers in there in the classrooms with us to demonstrate the AB system. And between
the three of them, they couldn’t get it to work. I can remember leaning across to our
subcontractor who at the time was helping us to design our AB system and saying,
“Remember, cutting edge not bleeding edge”. Our instructors were going to be coming
from the field and they will come in for two days or so and teach. They need a system
that is very intuitive and very easy to use. Do away with some of the bells and whistles
and make sure it works. Make sure its quality, but cutting edge, not bleeding edge.
DR. MADISON: Some people may not understand why you felt that rear screen
projection was preferable.
MR. LEMON: Rear screen just made more sense to us because it’s in the back and it’s
out of the way. It’s just as good in quality, but you don’t have projectors and things
hanging down in front of you in the classroom, getting in the way. They made sense to us
because we went around and looked at different formats. We asked what worked and
what didn’t work. The ones who were complaining about having to move projectors and
other things around said that they wished they had rear screen. Then, the question would
then be what type of rear screen. They would say, “Well not this kind! We tried that!”
Again, one of the best things we asked was what they would do if they had to design it all
over again. That’s where we heard about the lodge rooms. One time we were talking
about putting at least two people in every room. We had a Director, John Turner, whose
family runs a dude ranch out in Wyoming. John wanted bunk beds. He wanted six to
eight people in a room because people paid extra out at the dude ranch for that. But we
went around it. We asked what they would do differently and more than anything else,
the answer was, “Don’t force people to share a room. And for God’s sake, don’t force
them to share a bathroom!” There were a lot of old, converted women’s colleges or naval
facilities or something like that, which were dormitories and the bathroom was down the
hall. They had a heck of a time filling those facilities up because people didn’t want to
stay there. Times have changed, and we are dealing with adults. We designed almost all
smaller, single rooms but they are adequate and certainly comfortable. The other thing we
knew was that in the FWS, most of our people are introverts. We’re putting them in an
environment where they are forced, from the time they get up in the morning and go to
breakfast, to interact with people all day long; even in the evening. They are encouraged
to have dinner together and go work out or play volleyball together, drink a beer together.
At the end of the day, an introvert needs some down time by themselves. So if they are
forced to go back to a double room, and share a room with somebody else, that would
really disrupt their learning! There was a lot of thought that went into all of this.
DR. MADISON: Had the training center always been conceived as a residential training
center?
MR. LEMON: In my mind! I remember at one point; I don’t remember who it was, but
at one point we were looking at costs. Somebody said, ‘why don’t we just build the
classrooms and use hotels in town?’ I can remember saying, “No, if we’re not going to
have a residential training center, let’s not waste our money”. Because as much of the
learning takes place after hours. Again, the vision for NCTC was not just to train FWS
people, but to bring people from the FWS and other federal agencies, state agencies, the
Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the Cattlemen’s Association together, to learn from
one another, and more importantly or just as importantly, to build relationships. We
wanted to break down some of those communication barriers that kept us from finding
common ground, and common sense solutions to things like endangered species issues out
on private lands. We needed to build relationships here. That’s what people are coming
here to do. They may not know it. They think they are coming here for training, and
they are, but it’s part of the total experience to build relationships and networks with the
others they are interacting with. That has to happen at a residential facility. You don’t
do that between the hours of eight and five and then send them off somewhere else in the
evening where they all split and go hang out with their own like-minded people. It would
have been a colossal waste of money if we had built a non-residential training facility.
DR. MADISON: Three of the more unique things out here are the gym, the bar and the
daycare center. Were they all in the original design?
MR. LEMON: Yeah! In the old days for a training center, you needed classrooms, and a
bar. We found out from our visits that you need a classroom, a bar, and a gym because
more and more today, people want to try and stay in shape. It’s a good thing.
Organizations pay good money to try to keep people in shape because it cuts down on
healthcare costs, absenteeism and everything like that. We knew we needed a gym. The
good thing is that we were able to justify it very easily because we do Law Enforcement
training here. One of the things we were able to say is, “Here is the gymnasium and this
is here because law enforcement people need to pass certain tests.” It was never even
questioned. And Law Enforcement does use it for that, and the good thing is that all of
our staff as well as our guests use the work out facilities as well. At one point we talked
about putting a pool in. We could justify that and we were looking at it at one time. It
would be designed specifically for boating safety; simple things like entered and exiting a
boat and that type of thing. But as we went around and visited other training facilities;
the ones that had pools, the common theme was that they wished they didn’t have them.
They are very expensive to build, and very expensive to maintain. It doesn’t get used
very much. We were much happier to have treadmills and weights. That’s what we built.
The daycare center really came from discussions with our employees. We asked what
people really needed. And what we found out was that we have a lot of …and it makes
sense. Today, it’s a no brainer. It’s not like it took a lot of brains back then, but it took a
little thought. There are a lot of single parents who work for the FWS and others. For
some of them, if they can’t bring an infant or a toddler in with them, when they go to
training, they don’t go. They don’t have the nuclear families around them where they can
just leave the baby with grand mom and grand pop or something like that. We wanted to
build a place that would be family friendly, also for our employees, but especially for the
guests that would be coming who would not get training otherwise. One of the most
surprising things when we did that, and we started talking to people about what we were
doing; one of the most positive remarks we got on that came from Senator Byrd. Now
here’s an eighty year old gentleman, who had long since raised his children and grand
children, but he thought that this was a very good thing to do to help families stay in tact
and take care of really important priorities as they are training to better serve the nation.
I was very impressed that he thought this was a good idea and he really kind of singled it
out as one of the things he really liked about what we were doing out here.
DR. MADISON: Still talking about design; we talked about training needs, what
conservation needs went into the design?
MR. LEMON: Do you mean conservation of the natural resources and things like that?
DR. MADISON: Yeah, environmentally sensitive materials and things like that.
MR. LEMON: We are the FWS. We spend a lot of time telling other people what they
should do. So we figured we had better walk the talk. It would sort of be like the western
Red Cedar. We may be crucified, or held up as being pretty hypocritical if we didn’t try
to walk the talk. However, even there the guidance that I gave was, “proven technology”.
Because we’ve had some other examples in the FWS, and I won’t name where, where we
got a little bit ahead of ourselves and put up these wonderful sounding solar heating
systems, and things like that, which weren’t quite there. It was kind of bleeding edge
instead of cutting edge and then we had to come in and either rip them out, or add the real
heating system afterwards and retrofit it in. We wanted proven technology, and that’s
what we did. The heaters and chillers here are very, very high efficiency. There is super
insulation throughout. There is use of passive solar so that we can have these large
windows that allow our outdoor professionals to always be in visual contact with the out
of doors, which is important to them and their ability to concentrate. But they way they
are designed is that we are gaining more energy than we are loosing. The way we use the
shed roofs and things like that; you can talk to the engineers who know a lot more about
this, but the way we designed the shed roofs is during the winter when the sun is low in
the sky, we are getting a lot of heat gain because it’s coming right in those windows.
During the summer when it’s up higher, with the shed roofs, you’re not getting the sun
coming in those windows. So passive solar is a big part of what we did out here.
Recycled steel; all of the siding material is recycled steel. It’s recycled cars essentially.
Your 1974 Ford Pinto may be on our NCTC siding at this point. There is recycled rubber
in the gym. We used proven technology and recycled materials wherever we could. As
far as the master planning, we have 538 acres. We have probably less than a 100 acre
footprint here. We worked very carefully to save as many trees as we possibly could. I
can remember designing the bridge that goes from the instructional east, essentially, over
to commons and working very hard. There is one huge sycamore tree over by the
commons. That tree got a lot of attention and a lot of care to keep that alive. It worked.
One of the best testaments to that is that shortly after we opened, within six months to a
year from when we opened, people would come out who were unfamiliar with the facility
and ask how long we had been in existence. We would say, “six months”, or “we opened
a year ago”, and they were stunned. They said that they assumed the place had been here
for twenty or thirty years. So the master planning was very important too, to tread
lightly on the land, and to blend with the landscape and not overpower it. That was all
very important to us. I can remember coming out with the architects and roping off
where all of the buildings would be. We were putting up these huge red helium balloons
up to where the rooflines would be and then going off and visiting with neighbors. We’d
tell them, “If you look back through the trees you’ll see a roofline back where that balloon
is. Are you comfortable with that?” We went across the river to our partners at the
C&O Canal with the National Park Service and road up and down the canal [tow path]
across from the training center and looked over to see where those balloons were and say,
“This is what you’ll be looking at. Are you comfortable with that?” They were, and
very appreciative to be asked. There was a lot of thought and a lot of care that went into
that process.
DR. MADISON: We had some partners when it came to the creation of NCTC. Do you
want to talk about those a little bit?
MR. LEMON: We had almost too many partners to…I’ll start with probably the most
prominent ones. That was the Conservation Fund. That was Bob Putz. Bob knew
Senator Byrd very well. He was a long term FWS employee. Bob always had a vision of
developing people. The thing I always respected about Bob was the way he treated his
people and how much he got out of his people. He probably got more out of his people
than anyone else. Not because he had a whip and kept them chained to their desks; but
because he cared about them. He gave them direction. And he asked what they needed to
get the job done. Then he got the hell out of the way and let them get the job done. For a
low level employee, who was kind of watching, I said, ‘so that’s how you do that
leadership stuff!’ Bob was over at Leetown. We had the Fisheries Academy over at
Leetown. Bob always thought much bigger than that. He knew there was a much greater
need than just the fisheries program, and just the hatchery program, within fisheries. Bob
was very, very influential. Pat Noonan, at the time was the President and CEO of the
Conservation Fund, was a brilliant visionary, I think. He will go down as one of the
visionaries of the later part of the twentieth century in conservation for the way he went
about land acquisition and building partnerships. He was very much involved in helping
us with the Senator’s office and also in the Department of Interior. Again, not for
attribution at this point, there were a couple of attempts to take over NCTC after it was
being built and after it was clear what a special place this was going to be. There were
some people up in the Department, and some people in another bureau which will go
nameless that thought it would be a great idea if we just kind of shared this facility a little
bit more; which we do, obviously. We do share it. Fifty percent of the use is non-FWS.
But they thought that they should probably take it over and run it and people like Bob
Putz and Pat Noonan could do things that I couldn’t do, unless I wanted to be fired, as far
as going behind the scenes and making sure that this didn’t happen.
Then Pat Noonan, Bob Putz, Larry Selzer were going out and helping us reach out
to all of these…we said that conservation is a collective effort. We said that this place
should be built with other people in mind as well. We could go out to the other
government agencies, that’s who we are. We could go to EPA, the Bureau of
Reclamation, and the Park Service, the Forest Service and others and say, “What are your
training needs, and would you like to come and utilize this facility? Would you train with
us is we built this facility? If so, how big do we need to make it? What does it need to
look like? What kind of facilities do we need? What kind of training would we do there?”
But it was the Conservation Fund that really reached out to the not for profits. They
were the ones that went to the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, the Nature
Conservancy, the National Wildlife Federation, and all of those conservation through
environmental, not for profits. They also reached out to industry. That’s a neat thing
about the Conservation Fund. They can move, and they are equally comfortable and
equally respected on the conservation side, the government side and the industry side.
They put together a team that was actually headed by Bill Ruckellshouse, the former
administrator of EPA, and Ann McLaughlin to go out and work with and pull together
corporate VPs and say, “What kind of training needs to you have? Are there common
needs with the government people in conservation and natural resource management need?
So we got that input as well, and we would never have gotten that without the
Conservation Fund. They were probably the biggest partner that we had early on. Then
as we progressed, others came on board. We had people here on the staff from the Park
Service, the BLM and the Forest Service. We work with a lot of partners.
DR. MADISON: Moving off of the design; you broke ground for construction in 1994?
MR. LEMON: Correct.
DR. MADISON: Who was involved in the early construction process?
MR. LEMON: Now we put on the hardhats and the really hard work began. I can
remember the groundbreaking ceremony like it was yesterday. I can remember…I’ll tell a
funny story, but keep it short. It’s about Senator Byrd coming up and giving his speech.
And the Reverend Randy Tremble was here. He came up and gave the invocation, which
you always do when you have a ceremony, especially with Senator Byrd. Senator Byrd
got up and gave his speech and it was kind of a fiery speech; a very spirited speech, shall
we say. One of the things he was talking about was how much money he had been able to
bring to this project and make this possible for the people of West Virginia, as well as for
the FWS and the nation. The more he talked, the more he got caught up in it. He stared
talking about how even though he was bringing this money out here, there were these
“peckerwoods” in Congress down closer to the beltway who were complaining and
critical of him about bringing money to West Virginia for projects like this. He went on to
say, “Did I criticize Congressman Wolfe when he was pouring all of that money into the
Metro on Washington, D.C. in his District? No, I didn’t criticize him. That was needed
infrastructure. But he is criticizing me for bring money out to West Virginia!” He kind of
went on and on and at the end, when he was done and we were all done, Reverend
Tremble got up to do the benediction and he says, “It says in the good book that ‘the
Lion laid down with the Lamb’. But I can hear from Senator Byrd’s remark that the Byrd
will not be lying down with the wolf!” That was a funny story. I can remember the late
Molly Beatty there. She was the Director of the FWS at the time. Molly unfortunately
passed away from brain cancer unfortunately, before the facility opened. But Molly was
there. Senator Byrd and the local politicians; the Mayor was there. We had the Corps of
Engineers there. One of the Colonels was there because the Corps did construction
management for us. They did a very good job. That was another great partnership that
worked very well. We had Syntac Simpson, a representative from the construction; the
general contractor was there. So we broke ground. We had actually started already; not in
major ways, but we had already started clearing the site. This was kind of the official
thing where you have the gold shovels and take the pictures and things like that. Then,
things really got under way in earnest. That was October of 1994 and we had our
dedication ceremony and officially opened the doors in October of 1997. Really it was
three years but at the time it seemed like forever. You look back at the facility now and
see 400,000 square feet under roof, and sixteen different buildings at the time, and all of
the rock that had to be blasted for the utility lines and all of that stuff; it was a huge job!
You tore your hair out. You thought it would never be done. But it got done and it
worked well. Again, it was a great partnership with the Corps of Engineers. We did the
design with our own engineering folks and with the contracted architects. Then we
started thinking, “Okay, now we’ve got to build this sucker!” The FWS had never done
construction management on a facility of this size; not anywhere close to this. Besides, it
didn’t make sense to hire a whole bunch of people to do construction management and
then have to turn around and lay them off when it was done. We went out for bids from
other federal agencies and also from private contractors. We also went to the Bureau of
Reclamation. We talked to them and the Corps of Engineers. The Corps of Engineers
came back with the best package. The looked like they had the best capability of the ones
that were interested. So they did construction management for us and did a very good
job. A smart thing that we did was that we put FWS employees on the team with the
Corps of Engineers so that as we were building this place, we had people like Bob
Robertson; he worked for us and he was on the team with the Corps when everything
was being put in and everything was being laid out, thing were being buried and systems
were being put in. He was there to see where they were going and where the valves were
and how things were designed to work. Then he stayed on when we opened the doors.
That worked out very well for us too.
DR. MADISON: What were some of the biggest challenges during the three years of
construction?
MR. LEMON: The rock, and blasting rock. Your never quite sure what’s down there
until you get down there. So there was a lot of blasting. I told earlier about how we tore
the road up. You wouldn’t have been able to identify the road when we were done with
it. The other thing that happened was that we though we could use a lot of the local, you
know, dig the dirt out of the holes where we were putting the buildings and take it and use
it for roads and things like that. Well, it turned out the dirt wouldn’t work for that. For
whatever reason, it was not the proper type. To me as a biologist, dirt is dirt. But to
other people I guess, there are differences. But anyway, it wasn’t going to compact
properly for the foundations and it wasn’t going to work for the roads. We buried that
stuff pretty much on site, but we had to haul in dirt from other places. We had huge
dump trucks coming down that road. I don’t know how many of them on a daily basis.
Thank god we had built up a good reservoir of good will with the neighbors because they
got real tired of those trucks going up and down the road, and going too fast. I can
remember constantly, Steve Chase and others yelling at the contractors and at the Corps,
“Get your people to slow down!” They were subcontractors. And they were getting
paid by the load. And they were going to get here and dump as quickly as they could and
get out of here again. It was little things like that. There were delays. There were some
cost overruns. There were some but not much. It was so good to have the Corps because
they knew how, even though it was very much a partnership between us and the Corps
and the general contractor and the ‘sub’s, the Corps were very meticulous and very good
at keeping track of things and keeping records of things. When the contractor would come
back and say, “well you know, we’re loosing money on this part so we’re going to have
to charge you more and it because of this…” . The Corps was very good as saying
something like, “On such and such a day at 10:30 in the morning, the sun was shining and
you weren’t working. Now, on this date it was snowing and you were delayed and we’re
going to have to give you a half a day or two days leeway on that one.” I don’t know that
we would have figured that all out. That worked well. During the three years, it seemed
like an eternity. And it seemed like everything that could go wrong was. But it wasn’t.
And when you look at what we’ve built here and that it only took three years to get it
done. When people ask me about the relationship, I say that the proof is in the pudding.
Look at what’s here! Look at how well it’s holding up. Look at the reaction we get from
customers across the board; from FWS, maintenance people, biologists and Presidents of
the United States that come out here and are just blown away with the facility. It
worked!
DR. MADISON: Now the other thing you were doing during those three years was
starting the training program. How did that evolve?
MR. LEMON: That was another ‘minor’ detail too! We needed a lot of training in the
FWS, and we realized that. One of the first, good things we did was to go out with a
survey to every FWS employee and asked them to tell us what they were what they were
dealing with and where they were comfortable and where they weren’t comfortable. We
also asked them, “What kind of training do you need?” They came back with answers
like, “We need training in new technology”. Computers were fairly new back then. At
least a lot of the uses of them were. They needed training in that. We should have known
that, but we needed to hear it from them. Another thing we heard, and this was not
surprising, but reaffirming I think, our biologists were saying, “We’re coming out of
school with a degree in biology and we know we’re going to have to keep up with the
changes in technology and biology, and we are fairly confident there. But when we get
thrown into a job where we’re dealing with the public or other agencies that aren’t
necessarily happy with what we’re telling them to do, our communication skills aren’t
very good to deal with.” They wanted training in communications skills and conflict
resolution and those types of things. We went out and asked people pretty much told us
what they needed. Then we set about hired people and building those training programs.
There was some discussion. We didn’t have a lot of time for a whole lot of in depth
discussion about hardly anything because we were moving so quickly with the design,
construction and hiring people to build programs so that when we opened the doors we’d
have a suite of programs to offer. But we talked about whether or not we should be hiring
subject matter experts, people from the FWS who know the organization, should there be
instructional systems designs and curriculum specialists? The answer was yes. Then the
question became, “What’s the mix of those”? Do we put the curriculum designers over
here separate from these other people? No, we put those in the branches with the subject
matter experts so they can be working together to build programs that are going to work
for our people. They are properly designed. They use proper adult learning techniques,
proper instructional systems design, but they are going to make sense. And they are
going to credible with our employees. We were going through all of those thought
processes at the same time. We had tremendous help from the Deputy Regional
Directors group. They went through iterations. They started out as sponsors in the
Upper Level Management Development Program and then they became the Employee
Development Committee for FWS. At the time, those people were Deputy Regional
Directors, Deputy Assistant Directors; people like Marvin Moriarty, and Dave Allen and
Dale Hall and Wally Stukey and others. They helped us design the facility too. I can
remember Dave Allen working with us the question of how big this place needed to be.
How many people were we going to run through this place? How often is a FWS
employee going to be coming to this place? After we got that kind of figured out as best
we could, then we had to say, “We’re building this place for all of these other people and
they are saying that they will use it but they’re not giving us any quantification.” It’s
sort of like “Yeah, yeah, when we see it, we’ll believe it. Then we’ll let you know how
we’re going to use it!” There were a lot of best guesses in there as well. But again, it
came together well. We had a lot of training to do. We moved our training folks, and our
administrative folks that we were also starting to hire, to start looking at putting together
the contracts for how we were going to run Guest Services and how we were going to
provide Security, Maintenance and all of those things had to be figured out. That was
another whole trip; going out to other conference and training facilities after we had done
the original design. Now we went back out to them and asked how they had set up their
contracts. Is it cost, plus? Is it performance based? How do you do these things? What
works, and what hasn’t worked? So again, benchmarking was very important for us.
Then we hired people and put them in trailers and buildings and homes. Over at the
Leetown Science Center people over there were great to work with and very
accommodating. We hired our first approximately sixty people over there. Then we
started moving them over in the summer of 1997. We opened in October, so it was about
three or four months early. We were all like kids! We were looking around saying things
like, “My god, look at this!” It really happened! I can still remember sitting down with
people and having people just sitting there with these big grins on their faces. It was sort
of like, ‘we really didn’t believe it was going to happen. But somehow, through all of
this, it happened and look at what we’ve done! Look at what the FWS now has!’ There
was a lot of pride that went into it. The thing that I most worried about during
construction and design was not the construction delays, or the cement work not being
done properly; it was none of those things. It was, how are FWS employees going to
react to this place? Is it going to be too nice? That’s what kept me awake at night. One
of the most gratifying things to me was that when we opened the doors and when FWS
people started coming here for training, the first reaction was that they were walking
around with their mouths hanging open! Just like a kid! It was interesting. It was almost
like…no, not almost like, they said this; “This is too nice for FWS! We don’t deserve
something this nice!” The next thing they would say was, “Somebody is going to take
this away from us.” It was like we had an inferiority complex. But then they next thing
the said was how proud they were to part of FWS. We did something first class. We did
something that is the envy of other organizations now. And we did something that we
can use to lead. We’ve done something that other people can utilize as well. We’ve done
something that can be a home, not just for the FWS but also for natural resource and fish
and wildlife conservation for the nation. There was a lot of pride. And I had a lot of
people come up to me and say how they had been one of our worst critics when this was
nothing but a line item in the budget. They were the ones who thought how we could use
that “x” million dollars somewhere else like out in the field, or buying more land or do
something else. Then, after they came here, they would say, “Now I see this place and
see what it does for FWS and for the people of FWS. I can see the long-term impact that
this is going to have on the service and on conservation. This is the best thing we ever
could have done with that money!” So that was a real concern up front and probably the
most gratifying thing about completing this and getting the doors open and bringing
people in here. And again, we all knew too, that this money was going to be spent in
West Virginia. We knew that this was the way the appropriations process was working
and it was money that was going to be spent here. So it was going to here, or somewhere
else; a road or a bridge or some other infrastructure. We had a need for it and the nation
had a need for it. We built it and people have come. They have liked what they’ve seen.
They continue to come back and utilize the place. The most gratifying thing to me is that
long, long, long after I’m gone and all of us who were originally involved in putting this
together are gone; a hundred years after we’re gone, people are still going to be coming
here. They are still going to be in these classrooms. They are still going to be over in
Commons taking meals together and talking about the conservation issues of the day.
They are going to be coming up with solutions, and it’s going to be because somebody a
long time ago; a group of people a long time ago had the foresight to realize that the nation
needed something like this.
DR. MADISON: You mentioned earlier that you went to other training centers and
asked folks what worked and what didn’t work. Now that it’s ten years after
groundbreaking, what worked and what didn’t work here?
MR. LEMON: Oh no! You can’t turn that question around on me! Nothing! I
wouldn’t do anything differently! There’s not a whole lot that didn’t work well.
Classrooms; if I had it to do all over again we would probably have a couple fewer
classrooms and we would have used that square footage in making larger classrooms. We
looked at kind of a standard classroom. We went out and visited those other facilities and
looked at their standard classrooms. We saw how they had their furniture set up. We
said, “Okay, the standard classroom for twenty-five people needs to be such a size.”
That’s kind of what we built. People like a little bit more room to spread out. They
don’t necessarily like to set the table up in the conventional way. That’s not an efficient
use of space, but damnit, that’s the way they want it! They are the customers! So we
could have used some bigger classrooms. As a matter of fact now we are actually going to
be retrofitting up on the second floor of Instructional East where we have three
conference rooms together. We’re going to turn that into a large classroom because we
really need it. We get more requests for that than we can accommodate. So that would be
one thing. Another thing I think I may have done differently, and here are these little
things; the nice looking rock that’s out there, that you walk on in places, that was a bad
idea. Concrete would have been fine. We couldn’t use slate everywhere. The slate looks
nice and that’s holding up okay, but the rock is really hard to get snow off of. It’s not a
real stable walking surface. That’s another small thing that we would have done
differently. In the heating and cooling system, we probably would have given more
control to the customers. We were thinking that for conservation purposes. We do have
windows that open. We insisted on that. But for conservation purposes we figured that
at least the first lodges that we built, there wouldn’t be a control in the rooms. It would
be controlled from somewhere else, so we can do it. People are adults, so we would have
designed that a little bit differently.
DR. MADISON: Are there things that have worked better than you would have
guessed?
MR. LEMON: Yeah, everything! I don’t know if it’s things that have worked better
than I would have guessed. They worked as I had hoped they would. I guess maybe one
thing that has worked better than even I guess I could have hoped for is just the whole
ambiance of the place. We wanted to have an exceptional learning environment. We have
that. We wanted a very relaxed environment, because again, when you are bring people
together from the Cattlemen’s Association and the FWS for the first time, you want a
relaxed environment. The tensions are already high enough. So just the use of the alcoves
where you have the couches and people can sit when they are outside of class. I think
that was a good thing. The Commons, and just to see how the Commons is used and how
it becomes a gathering place for people. And to see how people kind of relax and to see
how everybody is kind of on the same footing. The bowling shirts go on and the
uniforms go off. That’s worked exceptionally well, I think. And what I hear, and this
was shortly after we opened, about a year after, some people came through from the
military. I remember one woman came up to me and she said, “I’ve been involved in
training with the military for 34 years. And I have been to training centers all over the
country and all over the world. I have not seen a better designed learning environment
than what I see here; just the total package!” That meant a lot. I am sure they are out
there. But that meant a lot to us. And then, just yesterday we learned that in a couple of
months the facility will be used by the Department of the Navy to train their Flag
Officers. It’s a two-week leadership development program that their newly minted
Admirals go through before their first posted as an Admiral. The US Navy’s senior
executive service, the civilian employees will be there too. So there’s about eighty of
these people coming up. They’ll go through their two weeks of leadership training here.
Their training team was here yesterday to go through the facility again and do a walk
through. I ran into them at the bridge and told them that I was really looking forward to
working with them, and that we want to make this a good learning experience for their
people. One of them said, “We couldn’t imagine a better learning environment, a more
relaxed environment, that what you all have developed here!” So, I mean, coming from
people who have a lot of resources and do a lot of training in a lot of places; that means a
lot.
DR. MADISON: What was the best part of the process for you?
MR. LEMON: The involvement of the people, the ideas, and the creativity. I shouldn’t
but I’ll say it anyway… we used to have a joke in the FWS, or at least people I knew in
FWS had it. That joke was, “If you think at all, think small!” We couldn’t have
developed what we did here, if we had lived by that motto. But that was our natural
tendency. We always had to save money. And we do need to save money. But when
you have an opportunity and that opportunity is never going to come again, and if the
money isn’t used on this, it’s going somewhere else, not where you might like to see it go,
but for something else, and when there is a national need for a place that can serve the
needs of the nation for generations to come, dammit, you take advantage of it! With big
opportunities come big responsibilities to step up and thing big. And to think as far
ahead at you can. Dream and dream big about what is really needed. To be able to sit
down with people and dream big; the creativity that came out of people was very
gratifying. The support that we have gotten is very gratifying. One of the best things; if
people ask me, when they do ask me about the experience and what I learned from it, it
was really reinforcing something that I knew all along. That was that especially in
training, if this place was going to work, building it would be the easy part. It would be
getting the resources to continue to operate and getting the support of the leadership of
FWS to send people here for training when we offer training courses and to put resources
here even when times get tight. To have that kind of support, we needed to have
leadership own this facility. This couldn’t be the design team’s facility. It couldn’t be
what we used to call the Office of Education and Training before we became NCTC. It
certainly Rick Lemon’s training facility. It had to be the service’s training facility and it
had to be owned by the service. We spent a lot of time in reaching out and going out to
the Deputies and saying, “This is our facility, what do we need? What are we trying to
do with our people? What do they need to know? What do they need to know about the
history and the heritage of the FWS?” And it was designing that into this place. It’s
another form of learning. It’s not just what they learn in the classroom. It’s the feel of
the place as they walk down the hallway and they see a picture of somebody how
worked doing conservation 93 years ago, and what that person’s name was and what
contribution did they make and how did they use their creativity and their guts to get
something done during difficult times? That’s all part of learning. But being able to sit
down with people and ask what all that needs to look like was just fascinating and
gratifying to have people; when given the opportunity to dream, come up with what
we’ve put together here. And we have learned along the way. We made mistakes and
adjusted and moved forward. It all seems to fit.
DR. MADISON: That’s an interesting design thing we didn’t talk about. The interior
design motif is largely historical in the public areas. Why did you guys choose that?
MR. LEMON: Well it’s historical because the heritage component is extremely
important. Again, I think that’s one of the neat things we did. That was part of the
design and part of the learning and part of the experience we wanted people to have when
they came to NCTC. If we could build a facility that was an exceptional training facility
but it wouldn’t speak to conservation if it was a sterile training facility. So this place
needed to speak to you while you were here, not by someone saying it to you, but by
you experiencing it every time you turned around. You turn around and you see a display
case and you see equipment that some innovative biologist developed in the 1950’s to
solve a problem they were facing and didn’t have the resources to go out and buy
something so they made something. It’s the same thing we’re doing today. People need
to see that. That’s a part of who we are. That’s a part of our culture. That’s a part of
our core values. That’s a part of what is expected of us a professionals in the FWS.
They need to see that. They need to see the face of the person that developed that thing,
and they need to see their name. It’s all a part of who we are. It’s a sense of pride and
motivation for people to realize what people did and the contributions that were made by
the people that came before us. There are some famous people like Rachel Carson, but
the vast majority of them are common folks that nobody had ever heard of and probably
no one, except for us will ever hear of again. But they were like us, common people who
shared an uncommon passion for conservation. They were going to find a way to get it
done. They were going to do it for the resource. They were going to do it for the critters
and they were going to save the dirt. And they would fine a way. It’s the same thing we
have to do today. All of that is part of the experience that we want people to leave
NCTC with. In a lot of ways, that experience is more important that the knowledge, the
policies that we are putting in their heads, but it all fits together.
DR. MADISON: You mention OTE before, one quick question is; how did we end up
with the name, National Conservation Training Center?
MR. LEMON: I don’t remember. It was originally NETC, the National Education and
Training Center. The idea being that the “education” was the education outreach; the
public education that we do here; the Division of Education Outreach, and then training.
I’m not sure who came up with that name. It could have been me, or somebody else, but
it was NETC for a long time. We decided, some of us decided, that maybe we should
have the word conservation in there someplace, or wildlife. So we started talking, and
throwing other names about. Conservation was the common theme. The great thing
about everything so far is that this was started in the first Bush administration and had
strong support. It went through the Clinton administration and had strong support. We
are in the second Bush’s administration with strong support. We hope that with the next
administration whoever that may be when they come in that we’ll have strong support.
We didn’t want it to be the National Environmental Training Center, because that has too
much baggage. Conservation is something that pretty much across the board, people can
buy into. We wanted ‘conservation’ in the name. We didn’t have to change the signs
because they weren’t already done but they were already in the drawings. It was NETC.
We went back and changed the name and came up with National Conservation Training
Center. We talked about ‘National Conservation Learning Center, but we thought that
that was just maybe a little bit too soft. We do training. Learning takes place in a lot of
different ways, but we do training. And we called it ‘training center’ so people would
understand that.
DR. MADISON: Last question. What would you recommend to somebody who was
setting out to build a training center, from your experience?
MR. LEMON: To somebody setting out to build a training center? Run! Think big.
Start with the end in mind. You need to be able to see what people are going to be doing
there. I’ll give you an example. When this facility opened, we walking out onto the patio
outside of Instructional West. It’s the patio that looks out at the long view down the
fields. As far as you can see it’s all NCTC property. It’s trees and it’s farm fields. I can
remember standing on that exact same spot before we started to build but we were
designing and just walking around the facility grounds. I said, “Okay, stand right here and
look this way. This is going to a patio, and FWS employees and other conservation
professionals are going to be in the building behind us in a classroom. They are going to
come out and grab a cup of coffee, and as quickly as they can they are going to go
outdoors. They are outdoor people. They are going to come out here and they are going
to stand on this patio. So we have to have a nice big patio here. They are going to look
down this long view and see these farm fields and trees, and stand under this sycamore
tree and they are going to hear the birds. They are going to say that this feels like home”.
So you need to see what it’s going to be. You need to be able to envision what it’s going
to be for a lot of reasons. One is so that you can design it, but two, so that you can sell it
to other people. So you can sell the vision to other people. So…think big, dream,
envision what it’s going to be and bring the partners to the table that you are going to
need. Not to get it built, but to operate it because that’s going to be the biggest struggle of
all. When times get tight having the support to keep this training center operating and to
keep the organization investing in putting people in airplanes and sending them here. You
need to get the people that will be making those decisions involved, up front, as you are
designing the place. Benchmark; go out and learn from other people’s mistakes and
successes. Don’t think that you have all of the answers. Go out and see what other
people did and learn from them. Ask a lot of questions. Have a good design team that is
interdisciplinary so that you have all views represented on the team. Listen to one
another but argue. We did a lot of arguing! Sometimes, the architects would just want to
“do it this way”. We’d say, “No!” and we’d argue, but we’d come to a better product.
At times we’d have to back off and say, “Okay, we may want it this way, but now that
we better understand what you’re saying we understand that we can’t do that; we can’t
get there from here. But, you need to understand who our customers are and we need to
make some changes.” It was an iterative process. It was not linear. But it worked very
well. I think that’s kind of what we would pass along to other folks.
DR. MADISON: Thank you very much Rick. This was a great interview!

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INTERVIEW WITH RICK LEMON
BY MARK MADISON JUNE 30, 2004
NCTC, SHEPHERDSTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA
DR. MADISON: Today in June 30, 2004 and we are in Shepherdstown, WV doing an
oral history with Rick Lemon, the interview is Mark Madison. The first question for you
Rick is; please describe your training background in the Peace Corps and in the FWS,
before NCTC.
MR. LEMON: Ever since I was in the Peace Corps in central Africa I’ve had an affinity
for training. I started out designing and running training programs for Peace Corps
volunteers once they left the States and came to central Africa. So it was the in-country
training; mostly fisheries training for people that came over there. When I came back to
the States and started to work for the FWS out in fish hatcheries, I used to continue to go
down to the southeast somewhere in the summer, on my own time, and so training for
Peace Corps. In this case it was training before they left the county. It was technical
fisheries training, usually down at the University of Auburn, or in Stuttgart, Arkansas at
our old warm water fish technology center down there. When I moved into the Federal
Aide program I went to work and starting to realize just by asking them, that what they
needed the most help in was really some training; some capacity building, some things
that a lot of different states needed. For instance like in land acquisition; how to do
conservation easements. This was twenty-five years ago when they were still fairly new.
I would put together, not where I had any expertise in the subject but just developing and
bringing in the people. That worked very well. Then, I was in the Department of the
Interior’s Departmental Development Management Program. It’s a one-year training
course that I was in, in Washington. While I was in there, the Director of FWS at the
time, Frank Dunkle decided that he didn’t want the FWS participating in the
Department’s program anymore. He wanted is own leadership development program for
the FWS. So he made a pronouncement that the FWS would no longer participate in the
Department program. We would have our own program. I went to his Special Assistant,
Marv Duncan whom I knew from having worked out in Denver with him. I asked him
what he was going to do about this new leadership program. He said, “I don’t know, I
don’t know anything about training”. I said, “I know just enough to be dangerous. Could
I take a shot at it?” He told me it was all mine. So I worked with the Fish and Wildlife
Foundation, with Whitney Tilt and Abe Messino at the time. We put together what
became the upper level Management Development Program for FWS. We ran that. I was
in other jobs. It was a collateral duty. I ran that for about five years.
DR. MADISON: What was the state of training in the FWS before NCTC?
MR. LEMON: We didn’t have a whole lot of training. I mean, the longstanding training
was the Fisheries Academy. The fisheries people had training going back actually to the
1950’s if not before. It was very well known. A lot of state people, through the training
would do fish health and fish culture training. There was also fish nutrition training.
They has quite a history but with a fairly limited slate of courses. Law Enforcement
people have always had training. That was done at FLETC, the Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center in Glencoe, GA. The Refuge Academy had also been
around for quite a while. They had two programs. There was a Refuge Academy and an
Advance Refuge Academy. There were other fits and starts. There was a little bit in
Ecological Services, but very little. There was a leadership program that they called the
“hermdippers”. I don’t even remember what it stands for any more. They ran that for a
few years but it kind of faded away. There was certainly not a comprehensive training
program in the FWS. What we had was fairly limited.
DR. MADISON: So how did the NCTC project get started?
MR. LEMON: Well, you’ll have to talk to some other people about and get in put from
people like Bill Maxin and Gary Edwards and Wendell Ogden and folks like that. When I
received the phone call. I was actually in doing the Upper Level Management
Development Program at the Xerox Center down in Leesburg. I was running that
program. I think it was Bob Putz and Dave Olsen who took me aside and said that it
looked like the FWS was going to building a training center. But they weren’t really sure
what it should look like, or who should be involved, or really anything else. They said
that there was some appropriations language that Senator Byrd put in the Bill in 1989
that went along the lines that there was some money to start the planning, development
and land acquisition for a FWS training center. The FWS should also consider design
options that would allow other organizations to use the center on a reimbursable basis.
There was also something in there about a fresh water aquarium; all to be built in the
Harper Ferry area.
DR. MADISON: What were the other possible sites you guys were considering? You
mentioned Harpers Ferry.
MR. LEMON: When I was brought on board, Bill Maxin took me out to an old quarry
site in Harpers Ferry. It was the Driggs property. It was quite an interesting site. It
really was an old quarry. In a way it was beautiful because there was some nice wooded
area up there, but it had this huge, three-eighths to a quarter of a mile quarry; which was
essentially a gash in the earth that was fairly deep. It was full of water and looked pretty
nice. But there were told mine tailings and railroad ties, buried there and there were some
other issues. The more we looked at the site, and brought in specialists to do contaminate
surveys what we found out was that there was a lot of industrial waste there. There
wasn’t much. I think there were some minor amounts of PCPs of something like that, but
not a lot. It was fairly contained, but there was still a lot of industrial waste there. It
would have taken a lot of clean up at that site to make it usable for a national
conservation-training center. Some of us were nervous enough about that site and the
contaminates on the site because of some of the history we’ve had in the FWS with Crab
Orchard and Tennicum and at other places where we got into something and then found
out how bad it really was. FWS had to spend a lot of money trying to clean it up. We
were nervous and started looking at some other sites. We even brought the Director, or
tried to bring the Director at the time, John Turner, out to look at the property. That’s a
funny story. The day he came out to get in his car, to drive out to Harpers Ferry that
morning, his car had been stolen out of his driveway. So John unfortunately didn’t make
it up. Dick Smith made it up and Mike Brennan and Bruce Blanchard who was my boss
at the time made it up. He was one of the two Deputy Directors. They looked at the
quarry site and looked around at some other sites as well. I have to say that against my
better judgment, a decision was made to move forward with the quarry site. We
proceeded with that and signed agreements with the landowner. Essentially, the
agreement said that as soon as you clean up this site to this certain level, we will acquire
the property. He started cleaning it up and started hauling things off and taking it to a
local landfill. The local landfill was shut down, not because of what he was bringing there,
but because of some past problems they had had and discovered in the landfill. When
that landfill closed down, his price of cleanup skyrocketed, because he would have had to
carry a lot of material for great distances. So he backed out of the deal and we were left
without a piece of property. We looked another site in Harpers Ferry that looked okay
at the time. Luckily it didn’t work out beside right now it’s in the middle of a housing
development and there are housing developments all around it. The fortunate thing was
that Bob Putz, who used to work for FWS and is retired right here in Shepherdstown,
WV. He worked at Leetown. He was the Director of the Leetown Science Center for a
long time. He is very close to Senator Byrd. He became the Assistant Director for
Refuges and Wildlife in Washington and then ended his career as Regional Director up in
Alaska. That was his last posting before he retired. Bob happened to know Mrs.
Hendricks, the owner of this site. They had worked together over at Shepherd College
years and years ago. Mrs. Hendricks just mentioned to Bob one time when she saw him
that she and her late husband, Charles Hendricks, had always thought that they would
love to keep this 538 acres intact and not have it sold off for a housing development. She
asked if he know of anyone that might be interested in the property for that kind of
purpose. Bob said, “Well, do we have a deal for you!” So we came out and luckily we
appraised the property. We included it in our NEPA documentation, but to be honest
with you it was kind of a throw away site at that point because we were still looking at
having to build some type of visitor attraction that would bring in a million visitors a
year. We couldn’t bring a million visitors a year down Shepherd Grade Road. This was
just too far off of the beaten path. We had it in there to kind of just to add another one in
there, and luckily we did. Because when the Driggs property fell down, and Harpers
Ferry went down we were still looking for another site. We were looking at the site that
is now in the middle of a housing development. Fortunately, I was at a County
Commission meeting and the press was there. I was reporting on where we stood on land
acquisition and design and everything else. I just mentioned that we were still looking for
a site. It was reported in the Shepherdstown Chronicle, the little local newspaper. Mrs.
Hendricks was living during the winter down at her daughter’s house in Arizona and had
the local Shepherdstown paper mailed to her out there. She read the quote that we were
still looking for a property. She called the FWS and said, “I didn’t know you still needed
a site. Make me an offer.” At that point, the visitor attraction had fallen through. We
said that we could offer her fair market value, but she had been offered a lot more money
than that in the past. She said, “If I was worried about the money, I would have sold it
long ago. Make me an offer.” Within thirty days, the FWS was in possession of this
property after having spent a good fourteen to sixteen months fooling around with land
acquisition down in Harpers Ferry. It was almost like it was meant to be. This is an ideal
site. Down there, any site we would have gotten, you would have heard highway 340,
because it’s a major highway. You could not get away from the road noise down there.
Plus, there were three working quarries down there. Here, we are so far off of the beaten
path that you don’t hear any traffic or any noise, just the birds. This is really an ideal
site.
DR. MADISON: Were there any other local sensibilities that you had to take into
account?
MR. LEMON: The thing that happened is that we had talking for so long about moving
into Harpers Ferry, everyone was aware of what we were doing down there. No one
really even knew that we were even looking at anything up here in Shepherdstown. It’s
not that we were hiding anything. It was just that we didn’t think we were going to be
here. So when we moved into this area, and moved in quickly, yeah, we were kind of
taking people by surprise. One of the best things I think we did was that we sat down
and gave it some thought and put together some strategy of how we were going to enter
the Shepherdstown community. I can still remember sitting down with Tom Davis and
Mary Lamen who is our neighbor across the street and also at that time, owned the
Shepherdstown Chronicle. We sat down with Mary and had breakfast down at the
Bavarian Inn and we talked about what was going on. We talked about the neighbors, the
community. And we talked about sensitivities in the community. We talked about who
we should working with and who we needed to reach out to. We asked Mary if we could
put an article in her paper, which she graciously approved. We helped to put that article
together, and it came out. I think that just to give a sense of where we were coming from
the headline of the article was We Want to be Good Neighbors, and it was all about how
we were building a training center. That was the approach we took from day one, even
when we were looking down in Harpers Ferry. We would always to the County
Commission meetings. The County Commission members I can remember saying, “You
all ought to be writing a book about how to enter a community because you are doing
everything right”. But to me and the others, it was just common sense; to Steve and Tom
and others. It was just common sense. You act like a neighbor. And especially with local
politicians, you don’t surprise them. You make sure that they know everything that’s
going on before their constituents get wind of what’s going on. When they get a phone
call from a constituent, they can say, “I know exactly what’s going on and this is what is
happening”. They can reassure them; and if nothing else they don’t look bad because
they are reading about things in the press. So we did that from day one. And I really
think it helped a lot. When we started construction out here, we tore Shepherd Grade
Road up! That road was never meant to handle the construction traffic that we brought
out on that road. There were literally ruts that were two feet deep. And there were part
of the road that had just crumbled and fallen off. But again, because we had worked so
hard with the neighbors, and we told them that the road would be improved and expanded
even; but not too much, because that’s what they wanted. We were not going to turn it
into a superhighway. But because exactly where we were and exactly when we would be
done and exactly when the road would be repaired and upgraded, they were willing to put
up with that for a while. I can remember having sessions down in Ann and Denny
Small’s basement. They are people who live down along the grade and are now part of
our Friends group. They were gracious enough to open up their home to us. We would
go in there with our flip charts and poster board, showing the center. We would just meet
with the neighbors and drink coffee and say that “this is what we’re going to do, and this
is what the buildings will look like, here’s where we’re going to put the entry road; we
could move it a little bit one way or the other if you’d like us to”. We even had Tom
Davis go over to Fort Detrick one day at lunch because one of our neighbors, the ones
that live right across from the entryway, he works at Fort Detrick. Tom drove over there
one day at lunch time just to lay out the plans with him and ask he was comfortable with
things like where the driveway was coming in. It was little things like that that I think
made a big difference with the neighbors. Sensitivities, yes, Shepherdstown is a very
sophisticated area. There are a lot of federal retirees out here and a lot of current federal
employees. There are a lot of professionals out in this area. Shepherd College also.
These people would have expected to be kept involved. And that’s what we did and
that’s the way we treated them. I think it’s been a very, very strong relationship ever
since.
DR. MADISON: So your cultural sensitivity training from the Peace Corps paid off?
MR. LEMON: Yeah! Maybe that was it! I don’t know! But like I said, it was common
sense to us. I have to admit too, and this is kind of a funny story, what may have helped
us a little bit too was that about the same time we were moving into this area, they were
talking about the CIA building a facility out around Charlestown. Of course, the CIA
can’t say, or confirm anything! So here we are laying out exactly what we’re doing and
what each building is going to look like and here’s where the road is coming in. The CIA
is saying, “No comment.” Compared to the CIA we looked really good! I think we did
the right thing and we did it for the right reason and it went very well.
DR. MADISON: You mentioned that Harpers Ferry was desirable because it was
accessible to traffic and so on. Do you want to talk a little about the National Habitat
Center plan?
MR. LEMON: Okay, I’m going to be brutally honest here. And this tape will not be
used against me. Senator Byrd had an interest in it obviously. And the Senator Byrd,
besides building the training center, which he was going to do to help the FWS. He was
also looking, as politicians do, to help the local community, his constituents. One of the
things was that the Harpers Ferry historical site is there. That brings people in for a three
or four hour stay, and they didn’t stay over night. They were looking for another anchor;
something else that would bring people to the area. They could go to the historical site
and then come to the aquarium or whatever else it was going to be. They’d spend the day
and it would get late and they would get hungry and decide to spend the night. It would
fill the hotels and restaurants and things like that. He asked us to look at the idea of an
aquarium. We did some feasibility studies. We went and visited aquaria around the
country; down in New Orleans, out at Monterey, and in Baltimore and up in
Massachusetts. When we came back we told the Senator that there were a lot of private
aquaria around the country and we weren’t sure that it made a lot of sense for the FWS to
be building one. As a matter of fact, we had a National Aquarium in the bottom of the
Commerce Building. So at that time, it didn’t make a lot of sense. But we went back to
him and said that if he’d consider something like a habitat center, we might be able to
draw the same number of people but the story we would be telling would be the story
about fish and wildlife habitat and why that’s important and how wildlife depends on
that. He said, “Okay, study that for a while and come back and we’ll talk about it some
more”. We studied that and worked with a firm to look at the feasibility of that. We laid
out some designs. We worked internally in the FWS with some of our environmental
educators. We came up with some plans and took them to the Director, John Turner. We
laid it out for John. We showed him what we’d do and how much it would cost. John
said, “That’s a lot of money!” We said, “We agree, sir, and if we had to choose we would
chose the training center.” That’s what the FWS really needed. John made arrangement
and we went up and visited with Senator Byrd with John Turner and Bruce Blanchard.
We kind of laid things out for the Senator and it was a lot of money, even to Senator
Byrd! He asked which of the two was most important to us and we told him that the
training center was really what we needed. He said that if this was our priority, that is
what would happen; to his credit. Then we went over and met with Mr. Yeates on the
House side of the House Appropriations Committee and went over the same things. This
is when it was decided to proceed just with the training center. At that point the
Shepherdstown site looked a lot better. Then we were able to start looking at this
property.
DR. MADISON: Just in a nutshell, what would the habitat center have looking like?
Would it have been like a biosphere?
MR. LEMON: You have it exactly right? It would have been biospheres. You would
walk into a desert habitat and see what kind of plant life and what kind of wildlife lives in
that habitat with the scarcity of water and things like that. You would walk into a
wetland area, or a prairie pothole, or a Pacific Northwest rainforest. It would be people
learning about the habitats of the United States and the wildlife that depends on that and
why habitat is important. That was the idea. If we were going to do something, that at
least was in keeping with the mission of the FWS, we thought, more than just an
aquarium.
DR. MADISON: We’ll let Disney build it in Animal Kingdom.
MR. LEMON: That’s right, we didn’t need to build it. Let somebody else build it!
DR. MADISON: What about the early design process for what became the training
center? How did that work?
MR. LEMON: It was a very interesting process, especially for us biologists, which most
of us were. We had some engineers on the job too. Essentially, what we did, and again, I
think this was one of the smart moves that we made, the Division of Engineering in
Denver with Sam Winnington and others, including Paul Camp and Marshall Wright
helped us find a firm of architects and architectural engineers to help us design this
project. As soon as that firm was selected, we sat down and started talking about what
we thought we were going to build and what it might look and what we were trying to do
with it. It was really a kind of scopeing and visioning process. One of the smartest
things we did was to go around a visit a lot of training and conference centers around the
country; public and private. We went to Pacific Gas and Electric out in California. We
went to the Postal Service facility our in Potomac, Maryland. We went to the top of the
line IBM training facility up in Palisades, New York. We went to some more commercial
conference centers in Denver and other places. We just went around and looked at the
classrooms, lodging accommodations, the dining halls, the gyms. We asked if there was a
swimming pool. Essentially, we asked what was working and what wasn’t working for
each of these places. The bottom line question was if they could do it all over again, what
would they have done differently in building these places. That really gave us the best
intelligence, or benchmarking, we call it today; about we should and shouldn’t do. We
learned from what other people had done and the mistakes they had made and things that
had been successful. The other thing that it did, because again, most of us were biologists;
we found out that the architects and the biologists were talking right by each other. We’d
say something and they’d say something and we’d both nod in agreement like we thought
we knew what each other was talking about and agreeing. Then we’d see something
written, or a sketch put together and say, “That’s not what we were talking about at all!”
So by going out and looking at these facilities, it was sort of like going out looking at
homes. If you go and look at enough homes, you can say that you like the combination of
the back yard from that one, basement from that one and the kitchen from that one.
That’s what we were able to do. We wanted the classroom design “…sort of like this
one here, with the large windows and the rear screen projection, but we really like the
lodging over here. And woe be to you if you ever design something like what we say over
here!” So it really helped us get on the same plane. And it worked out very well.
DR. MADISON: Did the architects get any information on the FWS to help them in the
process?
MR. LEMON: Absolutely. They did their history research. We sent them out to
refuges and hatcheries. They read about. They did a lot to learn about who they were
designing this facility for; FWS and other conservation professionals. So yeah, they were
very sensitive to that. But the great thing about the team that we had, by having the
architects who obviously knew their business, by having FWS engineers who knew their
business, and could translate between the architects and the biologists and by having the
biologists and the customers all involved and working very, very closely together for just
about a year and a half or more designing this place, then we’d get a set of plans back.
The first set of plans we got were for the Harpers Ferry site. We were that far along in
looking at things over there. We looked at the plans and said, “This isn’t it at all! These
buildings are all wrong!” Luckily they hadn’t gone too far with it. We went back and
rolled up our sleeves and sat down and said things like, “…the façade needs to look like
this.” Another excellent example is materials. We were talking about building materials
and we had a beautiful sketch of a beautiful building and it looked really nice. It had the
fieldstone like we wanted and had this other material up top. We asked what that was
and they said, “That would be wood.” We asked what kind of wood and the answer was,
“Pacific Red Cedar”. We came back with, “No, we don’t think so!” Here comes the
Spotted Owl! I could just see the picture and the article in the New York Times and the
Portland Oregonian about the FWS wiping out the remaining old growth forest in the
north west in order to building their training center! So there were sensitivities like that.
But again, the important thing was to be working very closely with them. We used
recycled steel for that and it worked out very well. It was a fascinating process for me, as
a biologist and I think it was a very good process for everyone all around. We all learned
from one another.
DR. MADISON: How did they settle on this aesthetic? You mentioned fieldstone and
steel roofs and those things.
MR. LEMON: There were a couple of things. We told them who our customer is. The
customers that would be coming here will be coming from national parks, national wildlife
refuges, fish hatcheries, the Forest Service; these are field folks who are coming here for
training. They are out of doors people, so build a place that speaks to them where they
will feel comfortable and they will feel at home here, ‘This is my home, I feel comfortable
here’. We took the designers over to Mrs. Hendricks’ house. We took them around and
walked through the house. We focused especially on the outside because the point we
were making there was that this house was at the time about two hundred and forty years
old. We felt that if this place can be this beautiful and this serviceable and be two
hundred and forty years old; if they do this that long ago, why is it that everything we
build today is falling down within forty years and looks terrible and is an embarrassment
to the organization? We’re never going to have the chance to do this over again. We need
to do it right the first time. We said that we wanted to do it right not for the people who
will come here today, but for the people who will be coming one hundred and fifty years
from now. Build it accordingly. We also told them to think about the Grand Lodges out
at Yellowstone and Yosemite. Think about that feel and the sense that you get it those
places because that’s where our people feel at home, and feel comfortable. So that was a
large part of the design. We wanted something that fit into this part of West Virginia; a
kind of rural landscape and vernacular with farm buildings, fieldstone, metal roofs, and
that type of things. I remember talking to them and saying that a word or two to describe
what I was looking for they would be “understated quality”. I wanted it to be quality
materials. I wanted it to last forever with little or no maintenance. But I didn’t want it to
be screaming in your face quality. I wanted it to be understated. So the use of the wood,
the fieldstone, the metal roofs all of those materials are very, very durable but they fit
well together. The architects did a fantastic job for us. That’s what we hear from our
customers. That’s what people tell us.
DR. MADISON: What were some of the training needs that had to be accommodated for
the design?
MR. LEMON: As far as training needs, everything in the FWS. Everything we did, we
needed training for. But as far as the design, we needed classrooms, well-designed
classrooms. We had all done enough training in hotel conference rooms and things like
that where you were afraid to tack something from the flip chart up on the wall, or tape
something on the wall. So we needed something that was a classroom. There is material
in these classrooms where you tack things up all around the room. But that it sound
absorbing and it also part of the sound system. That was part of the design. There are
little things like when we visited the Xerox Training Center; you would be in a classroom
and the backdoor of the classroom would open for somebody to go out to the restroom or
something, and there would be fifty people out in the hall taking a coffee break. Every
time that door would open this rush of sound would be coming in. It was very disruptive
to the instructor and to the students. All of our classrooms have a little vestibule; it’s
two doors. A lot of people other than trainers, people who are in the business will walk
in and say, “What’s with the two doors?” It makes a lot of sense, but it’s a small thing.
The rear screen projection systems are very important. I can remember going up to the
IBM facility in Palisades, New York. They took us in and showed us their classroom and
their AB system. This was high tech! It was so high tech that they had three IBM
engineers in there in the classrooms with us to demonstrate the AB system. And between
the three of them, they couldn’t get it to work. I can remember leaning across to our
subcontractor who at the time was helping us to design our AB system and saying,
“Remember, cutting edge not bleeding edge”. Our instructors were going to be coming
from the field and they will come in for two days or so and teach. They need a system
that is very intuitive and very easy to use. Do away with some of the bells and whistles
and make sure it works. Make sure its quality, but cutting edge, not bleeding edge.
DR. MADISON: Some people may not understand why you felt that rear screen
projection was preferable.
MR. LEMON: Rear screen just made more sense to us because it’s in the back and it’s
out of the way. It’s just as good in quality, but you don’t have projectors and things
hanging down in front of you in the classroom, getting in the way. They made sense to us
because we went around and looked at different formats. We asked what worked and
what didn’t work. The ones who were complaining about having to move projectors and
other things around said that they wished they had rear screen. Then, the question would
then be what type of rear screen. They would say, “Well not this kind! We tried that!”
Again, one of the best things we asked was what they would do if they had to design it all
over again. That’s where we heard about the lodge rooms. One time we were talking
about putting at least two people in every room. We had a Director, John Turner, whose
family runs a dude ranch out in Wyoming. John wanted bunk beds. He wanted six to
eight people in a room because people paid extra out at the dude ranch for that. But we
went around it. We asked what they would do differently and more than anything else,
the answer was, “Don’t force people to share a room. And for God’s sake, don’t force
them to share a bathroom!” There were a lot of old, converted women’s colleges or naval
facilities or something like that, which were dormitories and the bathroom was down the
hall. They had a heck of a time filling those facilities up because people didn’t want to
stay there. Times have changed, and we are dealing with adults. We designed almost all
smaller, single rooms but they are adequate and certainly comfortable. The other thing we
knew was that in the FWS, most of our people are introverts. We’re putting them in an
environment where they are forced, from the time they get up in the morning and go to
breakfast, to interact with people all day long; even in the evening. They are encouraged
to have dinner together and go work out or play volleyball together, drink a beer together.
At the end of the day, an introvert needs some down time by themselves. So if they are
forced to go back to a double room, and share a room with somebody else, that would
really disrupt their learning! There was a lot of thought that went into all of this.
DR. MADISON: Had the training center always been conceived as a residential training
center?
MR. LEMON: In my mind! I remember at one point; I don’t remember who it was, but
at one point we were looking at costs. Somebody said, ‘why don’t we just build the
classrooms and use hotels in town?’ I can remember saying, “No, if we’re not going to
have a residential training center, let’s not waste our money”. Because as much of the
learning takes place after hours. Again, the vision for NCTC was not just to train FWS
people, but to bring people from the FWS and other federal agencies, state agencies, the
Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the Cattlemen’s Association together, to learn from
one another, and more importantly or just as importantly, to build relationships. We
wanted to break down some of those communication barriers that kept us from finding
common ground, and common sense solutions to things like endangered species issues out
on private lands. We needed to build relationships here. That’s what people are coming
here to do. They may not know it. They think they are coming here for training, and
they are, but it’s part of the total experience to build relationships and networks with the
others they are interacting with. That has to happen at a residential facility. You don’t
do that between the hours of eight and five and then send them off somewhere else in the
evening where they all split and go hang out with their own like-minded people. It would
have been a colossal waste of money if we had built a non-residential training facility.
DR. MADISON: Three of the more unique things out here are the gym, the bar and the
daycare center. Were they all in the original design?
MR. LEMON: Yeah! In the old days for a training center, you needed classrooms, and a
bar. We found out from our visits that you need a classroom, a bar, and a gym because
more and more today, people want to try and stay in shape. It’s a good thing.
Organizations pay good money to try to keep people in shape because it cuts down on
healthcare costs, absenteeism and everything like that. We knew we needed a gym. The
good thing is that we were able to justify it very easily because we do Law Enforcement
training here. One of the things we were able to say is, “Here is the gymnasium and this
is here because law enforcement people need to pass certain tests.” It was never even
questioned. And Law Enforcement does use it for that, and the good thing is that all of
our staff as well as our guests use the work out facilities as well. At one point we talked
about putting a pool in. We could justify that and we were looking at it at one time. It
would be designed specifically for boating safety; simple things like entered and exiting a
boat and that type of thing. But as we went around and visited other training facilities;
the ones that had pools, the common theme was that they wished they didn’t have them.
They are very expensive to build, and very expensive to maintain. It doesn’t get used
very much. We were much happier to have treadmills and weights. That’s what we built.
The daycare center really came from discussions with our employees. We asked what
people really needed. And what we found out was that we have a lot of …and it makes
sense. Today, it’s a no brainer. It’s not like it took a lot of brains back then, but it took a
little thought. There are a lot of single parents who work for the FWS and others. For
some of them, if they can’t bring an infant or a toddler in with them, when they go to
training, they don’t go. They don’t have the nuclear families around them where they can
just leave the baby with grand mom and grand pop or something like that. We wanted to
build a place that would be family friendly, also for our employees, but especially for the
guests that would be coming who would not get training otherwise. One of the most
surprising things when we did that, and we started talking to people about what we were
doing; one of the most positive remarks we got on that came from Senator Byrd. Now
here’s an eighty year old gentleman, who had long since raised his children and grand
children, but he thought that this was a very good thing to do to help families stay in tact
and take care of really important priorities as they are training to better serve the nation.
I was very impressed that he thought this was a good idea and he really kind of singled it
out as one of the things he really liked about what we were doing out here.
DR. MADISON: Still talking about design; we talked about training needs, what
conservation needs went into the design?
MR. LEMON: Do you mean conservation of the natural resources and things like that?
DR. MADISON: Yeah, environmentally sensitive materials and things like that.
MR. LEMON: We are the FWS. We spend a lot of time telling other people what they
should do. So we figured we had better walk the talk. It would sort of be like the western
Red Cedar. We may be crucified, or held up as being pretty hypocritical if we didn’t try
to walk the talk. However, even there the guidance that I gave was, “proven technology”.
Because we’ve had some other examples in the FWS, and I won’t name where, where we
got a little bit ahead of ourselves and put up these wonderful sounding solar heating
systems, and things like that, which weren’t quite there. It was kind of bleeding edge
instead of cutting edge and then we had to come in and either rip them out, or add the real
heating system afterwards and retrofit it in. We wanted proven technology, and that’s
what we did. The heaters and chillers here are very, very high efficiency. There is super
insulation throughout. There is use of passive solar so that we can have these large
windows that allow our outdoor professionals to always be in visual contact with the out
of doors, which is important to them and their ability to concentrate. But they way they
are designed is that we are gaining more energy than we are loosing. The way we use the
shed roofs and things like that; you can talk to the engineers who know a lot more about
this, but the way we designed the shed roofs is during the winter when the sun is low in
the sky, we are getting a lot of heat gain because it’s coming right in those windows.
During the summer when it’s up higher, with the shed roofs, you’re not getting the sun
coming in those windows. So passive solar is a big part of what we did out here.
Recycled steel; all of the siding material is recycled steel. It’s recycled cars essentially.
Your 1974 Ford Pinto may be on our NCTC siding at this point. There is recycled rubber
in the gym. We used proven technology and recycled materials wherever we could. As
far as the master planning, we have 538 acres. We have probably less than a 100 acre
footprint here. We worked very carefully to save as many trees as we possibly could. I
can remember designing the bridge that goes from the instructional east, essentially, over
to commons and working very hard. There is one huge sycamore tree over by the
commons. That tree got a lot of attention and a lot of care to keep that alive. It worked.
One of the best testaments to that is that shortly after we opened, within six months to a
year from when we opened, people would come out who were unfamiliar with the facility
and ask how long we had been in existence. We would say, “six months”, or “we opened
a year ago”, and they were stunned. They said that they assumed the place had been here
for twenty or thirty years. So the master planning was very important too, to tread
lightly on the land, and to blend with the landscape and not overpower it. That was all
very important to us. I can remember coming out with the architects and roping off
where all of the buildings would be. We were putting up these huge red helium balloons
up to where the rooflines would be and then going off and visiting with neighbors. We’d
tell them, “If you look back through the trees you’ll see a roofline back where that balloon
is. Are you comfortable with that?” We went across the river to our partners at the
C&O Canal with the National Park Service and road up and down the canal [tow path]
across from the training center and looked over to see where those balloons were and say,
“This is what you’ll be looking at. Are you comfortable with that?” They were, and
very appreciative to be asked. There was a lot of thought and a lot of care that went into
that process.
DR. MADISON: We had some partners when it came to the creation of NCTC. Do you
want to talk about those a little bit?
MR. LEMON: We had almost too many partners to…I’ll start with probably the most
prominent ones. That was the Conservation Fund. That was Bob Putz. Bob knew
Senator Byrd very well. He was a long term FWS employee. Bob always had a vision of
developing people. The thing I always respected about Bob was the way he treated his
people and how much he got out of his people. He probably got more out of his people
than anyone else. Not because he had a whip and kept them chained to their desks; but
because he cared about them. He gave them direction. And he asked what they needed to
get the job done. Then he got the hell out of the way and let them get the job done. For a
low level employee, who was kind of watching, I said, ‘so that’s how you do that
leadership stuff!’ Bob was over at Leetown. We had the Fisheries Academy over at
Leetown. Bob always thought much bigger than that. He knew there was a much greater
need than just the fisheries program, and just the hatchery program, within fisheries. Bob
was very, very influential. Pat Noonan, at the time was the President and CEO of the
Conservation Fund, was a brilliant visionary, I think. He will go down as one of the
visionaries of the later part of the twentieth century in conservation for the way he went
about land acquisition and building partnerships. He was very much involved in helping
us with the Senator’s office and also in the Department of Interior. Again, not for
attribution at this point, there were a couple of attempts to take over NCTC after it was
being built and after it was clear what a special place this was going to be. There were
some people up in the Department, and some people in another bureau which will go
nameless that thought it would be a great idea if we just kind of shared this facility a little
bit more; which we do, obviously. We do share it. Fifty percent of the use is non-FWS.
But they thought that they should probably take it over and run it and people like Bob
Putz and Pat Noonan could do things that I couldn’t do, unless I wanted to be fired, as far
as going behind the scenes and making sure that this didn’t happen.
Then Pat Noonan, Bob Putz, Larry Selzer were going out and helping us reach out
to all of these…we said that conservation is a collective effort. We said that this place
should be built with other people in mind as well. We could go out to the other
government agencies, that’s who we are. We could go to EPA, the Bureau of
Reclamation, and the Park Service, the Forest Service and others and say, “What are your
training needs, and would you like to come and utilize this facility? Would you train with
us is we built this facility? If so, how big do we need to make it? What does it need to
look like? What kind of facilities do we need? What kind of training would we do there?”
But it was the Conservation Fund that really reached out to the not for profits. They
were the ones that went to the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, the Nature
Conservancy, the National Wildlife Federation, and all of those conservation through
environmental, not for profits. They also reached out to industry. That’s a neat thing
about the Conservation Fund. They can move, and they are equally comfortable and
equally respected on the conservation side, the government side and the industry side.
They put together a team that was actually headed by Bill Ruckellshouse, the former
administrator of EPA, and Ann McLaughlin to go out and work with and pull together
corporate VPs and say, “What kind of training needs to you have? Are there common
needs with the government people in conservation and natural resource management need?
So we got that input as well, and we would never have gotten that without the
Conservation Fund. They were probably the biggest partner that we had early on. Then
as we progressed, others came on board. We had people here on the staff from the Park
Service, the BLM and the Forest Service. We work with a lot of partners.
DR. MADISON: Moving off of the design; you broke ground for construction in 1994?
MR. LEMON: Correct.
DR. MADISON: Who was involved in the early construction process?
MR. LEMON: Now we put on the hardhats and the really hard work began. I can
remember the groundbreaking ceremony like it was yesterday. I can remember…I’ll tell a
funny story, but keep it short. It’s about Senator Byrd coming up and giving his speech.
And the Reverend Randy Tremble was here. He came up and gave the invocation, which
you always do when you have a ceremony, especially with Senator Byrd. Senator Byrd
got up and gave his speech and it was kind of a fiery speech; a very spirited speech, shall
we say. One of the things he was talking about was how much money he had been able to
bring to this project and make this possible for the people of West Virginia, as well as for
the FWS and the nation. The more he talked, the more he got caught up in it. He stared
talking about how even though he was bringing this money out here, there were these
“peckerwoods” in Congress down closer to the beltway who were complaining and
critical of him about bringing money to West Virginia for projects like this. He went on to
say, “Did I criticize Congressman Wolfe when he was pouring all of that money into the
Metro on Washington, D.C. in his District? No, I didn’t criticize him. That was needed
infrastructure. But he is criticizing me for bring money out to West Virginia!” He kind of
went on and on and at the end, when he was done and we were all done, Reverend
Tremble got up to do the benediction and he says, “It says in the good book that ‘the
Lion laid down with the Lamb’. But I can hear from Senator Byrd’s remark that the Byrd
will not be lying down with the wolf!” That was a funny story. I can remember the late
Molly Beatty there. She was the Director of the FWS at the time. Molly unfortunately
passed away from brain cancer unfortunately, before the facility opened. But Molly was
there. Senator Byrd and the local politicians; the Mayor was there. We had the Corps of
Engineers there. One of the Colonels was there because the Corps did construction
management for us. They did a very good job. That was another great partnership that
worked very well. We had Syntac Simpson, a representative from the construction; the
general contractor was there. So we broke ground. We had actually started already; not in
major ways, but we had already started clearing the site. This was kind of the official
thing where you have the gold shovels and take the pictures and things like that. Then,
things really got under way in earnest. That was October of 1994 and we had our
dedication ceremony and officially opened the doors in October of 1997. Really it was
three years but at the time it seemed like forever. You look back at the facility now and
see 400,000 square feet under roof, and sixteen different buildings at the time, and all of
the rock that had to be blasted for the utility lines and all of that stuff; it was a huge job!
You tore your hair out. You thought it would never be done. But it got done and it
worked well. Again, it was a great partnership with the Corps of Engineers. We did the
design with our own engineering folks and with the contracted architects. Then we
started thinking, “Okay, now we’ve got to build this sucker!” The FWS had never done
construction management on a facility of this size; not anywhere close to this. Besides, it
didn’t make sense to hire a whole bunch of people to do construction management and
then have to turn around and lay them off when it was done. We went out for bids from
other federal agencies and also from private contractors. We also went to the Bureau of
Reclamation. We talked to them and the Corps of Engineers. The Corps of Engineers
came back with the best package. The looked like they had the best capability of the ones
that were interested. So they did construction management for us and did a very good
job. A smart thing that we did was that we put FWS employees on the team with the
Corps of Engineers so that as we were building this place, we had people like Bob
Robertson; he worked for us and he was on the team with the Corps when everything
was being put in and everything was being laid out, thing were being buried and systems
were being put in. He was there to see where they were going and where the valves were
and how things were designed to work. Then he stayed on when we opened the doors.
That worked out very well for us too.
DR. MADISON: What were some of the biggest challenges during the three years of
construction?
MR. LEMON: The rock, and blasting rock. Your never quite sure what’s down there
until you get down there. So there was a lot of blasting. I told earlier about how we tore
the road up. You wouldn’t have been able to identify the road when we were done with
it. The other thing that happened was that we though we could use a lot of the local, you
know, dig the dirt out of the holes where we were putting the buildings and take it and use
it for roads and things like that. Well, it turned out the dirt wouldn’t work for that. For
whatever reason, it was not the proper type. To me as a biologist, dirt is dirt. But to
other people I guess, there are differences. But anyway, it wasn’t going to compact
properly for the foundations and it wasn’t going to work for the roads. We buried that
stuff pretty much on site, but we had to haul in dirt from other places. We had huge
dump trucks coming down that road. I don’t know how many of them on a daily basis.
Thank god we had built up a good reservoir of good will with the neighbors because they
got real tired of those trucks going up and down the road, and going too fast. I can
remember constantly, Steve Chase and others yelling at the contractors and at the Corps,
“Get your people to slow down!” They were subcontractors. And they were getting
paid by the load. And they were going to get here and dump as quickly as they could and
get out of here again. It was little things like that. There were delays. There were some
cost overruns. There were some but not much. It was so good to have the Corps because
they knew how, even though it was very much a partnership between us and the Corps
and the general contractor and the ‘sub’s, the Corps were very meticulous and very good
at keeping track of things and keeping records of things. When the contractor would come
back and say, “well you know, we’re loosing money on this part so we’re going to have
to charge you more and it because of this…” . The Corps was very good as saying
something like, “On such and such a day at 10:30 in the morning, the sun was shining and
you weren’t working. Now, on this date it was snowing and you were delayed and we’re
going to have to give you a half a day or two days leeway on that one.” I don’t know that
we would have figured that all out. That worked well. During the three years, it seemed
like an eternity. And it seemed like everything that could go wrong was. But it wasn’t.
And when you look at what we’ve built here and that it only took three years to get it
done. When people ask me about the relationship, I say that the proof is in the pudding.
Look at what’s here! Look at how well it’s holding up. Look at the reaction we get from
customers across the board; from FWS, maintenance people, biologists and Presidents of
the United States that come out here and are just blown away with the facility. It
worked!
DR. MADISON: Now the other thing you were doing during those three years was
starting the training program. How did that evolve?
MR. LEMON: That was another ‘minor’ detail too! We needed a lot of training in the
FWS, and we realized that. One of the first, good things we did was to go out with a
survey to every FWS employee and asked them to tell us what they were what they were
dealing with and where they were comfortable and where they weren’t comfortable. We
also asked them, “What kind of training do you need?” They came back with answers
like, “We need training in new technology”. Computers were fairly new back then. At
least a lot of the uses of them were. They needed training in that. We should have known
that, but we needed to hear it from them. Another thing we heard, and this was not
surprising, but reaffirming I think, our biologists were saying, “We’re coming out of
school with a degree in biology and we know we’re going to have to keep up with the
changes in technology and biology, and we are fairly confident there. But when we get
thrown into a job where we’re dealing with the public or other agencies that aren’t
necessarily happy with what we’re telling them to do, our communication skills aren’t
very good to deal with.” They wanted training in communications skills and conflict
resolution and those types of things. We went out and asked people pretty much told us
what they needed. Then we set about hired people and building those training programs.
There was some discussion. We didn’t have a lot of time for a whole lot of in depth
discussion about hardly anything because we were moving so quickly with the design,
construction and hiring people to build programs so that when we opened the doors we’d
have a suite of programs to offer. But we talked about whether or not we should be hiring
subject matter experts, people from the FWS who know the organization, should there be
instructional systems designs and curriculum specialists? The answer was yes. Then the
question became, “What’s the mix of those”? Do we put the curriculum designers over
here separate from these other people? No, we put those in the branches with the subject
matter experts so they can be working together to build programs that are going to work
for our people. They are properly designed. They use proper adult learning techniques,
proper instructional systems design, but they are going to make sense. And they are
going to credible with our employees. We were going through all of those thought
processes at the same time. We had tremendous help from the Deputy Regional
Directors group. They went through iterations. They started out as sponsors in the
Upper Level Management Development Program and then they became the Employee
Development Committee for FWS. At the time, those people were Deputy Regional
Directors, Deputy Assistant Directors; people like Marvin Moriarty, and Dave Allen and
Dale Hall and Wally Stukey and others. They helped us design the facility too. I can
remember Dave Allen working with us the question of how big this place needed to be.
How many people were we going to run through this place? How often is a FWS
employee going to be coming to this place? After we got that kind of figured out as best
we could, then we had to say, “We’re building this place for all of these other people and
they are saying that they will use it but they’re not giving us any quantification.” It’s
sort of like “Yeah, yeah, when we see it, we’ll believe it. Then we’ll let you know how
we’re going to use it!” There were a lot of best guesses in there as well. But again, it
came together well. We had a lot of training to do. We moved our training folks, and our
administrative folks that we were also starting to hire, to start looking at putting together
the contracts for how we were going to run Guest Services and how we were going to
provide Security, Maintenance and all of those things had to be figured out. That was
another whole trip; going out to other conference and training facilities after we had done
the original design. Now we went back out to them and asked how they had set up their
contracts. Is it cost, plus? Is it performance based? How do you do these things? What
works, and what hasn’t worked? So again, benchmarking was very important for us.
Then we hired people and put them in trailers and buildings and homes. Over at the
Leetown Science Center people over there were great to work with and very
accommodating. We hired our first approximately sixty people over there. Then we
started moving them over in the summer of 1997. We opened in October, so it was about
three or four months early. We were all like kids! We were looking around saying things
like, “My god, look at this!” It really happened! I can still remember sitting down with
people and having people just sitting there with these big grins on their faces. It was sort
of like, ‘we really didn’t believe it was going to happen. But somehow, through all of
this, it happened and look at what we’ve done! Look at what the FWS now has!’ There
was a lot of pride that went into it. The thing that I most worried about during
construction and design was not the construction delays, or the cement work not being
done properly; it was none of those things. It was, how are FWS employees going to
react to this place? Is it going to be too nice? That’s what kept me awake at night. One
of the most gratifying things to me was that when we opened the doors and when FWS
people started coming here for training, the first reaction was that they were walking
around with their mouths hanging open! Just like a kid! It was interesting. It was almost
like…no, not almost like, they said this; “This is too nice for FWS! We don’t deserve
something this nice!” The next thing they would say was, “Somebody is going to take
this away from us.” It was like we had an inferiority complex. But then they next thing
the said was how proud they were to part of FWS. We did something first class. We did
something that is the envy of other organizations now. And we did something that we
can use to lead. We’ve done something that other people can utilize as well. We’ve done
something that can be a home, not just for the FWS but also for natural resource and fish
and wildlife conservation for the nation. There was a lot of pride. And I had a lot of
people come up to me and say how they had been one of our worst critics when this was
nothing but a line item in the budget. They were the ones who thought how we could use
that “x” million dollars somewhere else like out in the field, or buying more land or do
something else. Then, after they came here, they would say, “Now I see this place and
see what it does for FWS and for the people of FWS. I can see the long-term impact that
this is going to have on the service and on conservation. This is the best thing we ever
could have done with that money!” So that was a real concern up front and probably the
most gratifying thing about completing this and getting the doors open and bringing
people in here. And again, we all knew too, that this money was going to be spent in
West Virginia. We knew that this was the way the appropriations process was working
and it was money that was going to be spent here. So it was going to here, or somewhere
else; a road or a bridge or some other infrastructure. We had a need for it and the nation
had a need for it. We built it and people have come. They have liked what they’ve seen.
They continue to come back and utilize the place. The most gratifying thing to me is that
long, long, long after I’m gone and all of us who were originally involved in putting this
together are gone; a hundred years after we’re gone, people are still going to be coming
here. They are still going to be in these classrooms. They are still going to be over in
Commons taking meals together and talking about the conservation issues of the day.
They are going to be coming up with solutions, and it’s going to be because somebody a
long time ago; a group of people a long time ago had the foresight to realize that the nation
needed something like this.
DR. MADISON: You mentioned earlier that you went to other training centers and
asked folks what worked and what didn’t work. Now that it’s ten years after
groundbreaking, what worked and what didn’t work here?
MR. LEMON: Oh no! You can’t turn that question around on me! Nothing! I
wouldn’t do anything differently! There’s not a whole lot that didn’t work well.
Classrooms; if I had it to do all over again we would probably have a couple fewer
classrooms and we would have used that square footage in making larger classrooms. We
looked at kind of a standard classroom. We went out and visited those other facilities and
looked at their standard classrooms. We saw how they had their furniture set up. We
said, “Okay, the standard classroom for twenty-five people needs to be such a size.”
That’s kind of what we built. People like a little bit more room to spread out. They
don’t necessarily like to set the table up in the conventional way. That’s not an efficient
use of space, but damnit, that’s the way they want it! They are the customers! So we
could have used some bigger classrooms. As a matter of fact now we are actually going to
be retrofitting up on the second floor of Instructional East where we have three
conference rooms together. We’re going to turn that into a large classroom because we
really need it. We get more requests for that than we can accommodate. So that would be
one thing. Another thing I think I may have done differently, and here are these little
things; the nice looking rock that’s out there, that you walk on in places, that was a bad
idea. Concrete would have been fine. We couldn’t use slate everywhere. The slate looks
nice and that’s holding up okay, but the rock is really hard to get snow off of. It’s not a
real stable walking surface. That’s another small thing that we would have done
differently. In the heating and cooling system, we probably would have given more
control to the customers. We were thinking that for conservation purposes. We do have
windows that open. We insisted on that. But for conservation purposes we figured that
at least the first lodges that we built, there wouldn’t be a control in the rooms. It would
be controlled from somewhere else, so we can do it. People are adults, so we would have
designed that a little bit differently.
DR. MADISON: Are there things that have worked better than you would have
guessed?
MR. LEMON: Yeah, everything! I don’t know if it’s things that have worked better
than I would have guessed. They worked as I had hoped they would. I guess maybe one
thing that has worked better than even I guess I could have hoped for is just the whole
ambiance of the place. We wanted to have an exceptional learning environment. We have
that. We wanted a very relaxed environment, because again, when you are bring people
together from the Cattlemen’s Association and the FWS for the first time, you want a
relaxed environment. The tensions are already high enough. So just the use of the alcoves
where you have the couches and people can sit when they are outside of class. I think
that was a good thing. The Commons, and just to see how the Commons is used and how
it becomes a gathering place for people. And to see how people kind of relax and to see
how everybody is kind of on the same footing. The bowling shirts go on and the
uniforms go off. That’s worked exceptionally well, I think. And what I hear, and this
was shortly after we opened, about a year after, some people came through from the
military. I remember one woman came up to me and she said, “I’ve been involved in
training with the military for 34 years. And I have been to training centers all over the
country and all over the world. I have not seen a better designed learning environment
than what I see here; just the total package!” That meant a lot. I am sure they are out
there. But that meant a lot to us. And then, just yesterday we learned that in a couple of
months the facility will be used by the Department of the Navy to train their Flag
Officers. It’s a two-week leadership development program that their newly minted
Admirals go through before their first posted as an Admiral. The US Navy’s senior
executive service, the civilian employees will be there too. So there’s about eighty of
these people coming up. They’ll go through their two weeks of leadership training here.
Their training team was here yesterday to go through the facility again and do a walk
through. I ran into them at the bridge and told them that I was really looking forward to
working with them, and that we want to make this a good learning experience for their
people. One of them said, “We couldn’t imagine a better learning environment, a more
relaxed environment, that what you all have developed here!” So, I mean, coming from
people who have a lot of resources and do a lot of training in a lot of places; that means a
lot.
DR. MADISON: What was the best part of the process for you?
MR. LEMON: The involvement of the people, the ideas, and the creativity. I shouldn’t
but I’ll say it anyway… we used to have a joke in the FWS, or at least people I knew in
FWS had it. That joke was, “If you think at all, think small!” We couldn’t have
developed what we did here, if we had lived by that motto. But that was our natural
tendency. We always had to save money. And we do need to save money. But when
you have an opportunity and that opportunity is never going to come again, and if the
money isn’t used on this, it’s going somewhere else, not where you might like to see it go,
but for something else, and when there is a national need for a place that can serve the
needs of the nation for generations to come, dammit, you take advantage of it! With big
opportunities come big responsibilities to step up and thing big. And to think as far
ahead at you can. Dream and dream big about what is really needed. To be able to sit
down with people and dream big; the creativity that came out of people was very
gratifying. The support that we have gotten is very gratifying. One of the best things; if
people ask me, when they do ask me about the experience and what I learned from it, it
was really reinforcing something that I knew all along. That was that especially in
training, if this place was going to work, building it would be the easy part. It would be
getting the resources to continue to operate and getting the support of the leadership of
FWS to send people here for training when we offer training courses and to put resources
here even when times get tight. To have that kind of support, we needed to have
leadership own this facility. This couldn’t be the design team’s facility. It couldn’t be
what we used to call the Office of Education and Training before we became NCTC. It
certainly Rick Lemon’s training facility. It had to be the service’s training facility and it
had to be owned by the service. We spent a lot of time in reaching out and going out to
the Deputies and saying, “This is our facility, what do we need? What are we trying to
do with our people? What do they need to know? What do they need to know about the
history and the heritage of the FWS?” And it was designing that into this place. It’s
another form of learning. It’s not just what they learn in the classroom. It’s the feel of
the place as they walk down the hallway and they see a picture of somebody how
worked doing conservation 93 years ago, and what that person’s name was and what
contribution did they make and how did they use their creativity and their guts to get
something done during difficult times? That’s all part of learning. But being able to sit
down with people and ask what all that needs to look like was just fascinating and
gratifying to have people; when given the opportunity to dream, come up with what
we’ve put together here. And we have learned along the way. We made mistakes and
adjusted and moved forward. It all seems to fit.
DR. MADISON: That’s an interesting design thing we didn’t talk about. The interior
design motif is largely historical in the public areas. Why did you guys choose that?
MR. LEMON: Well it’s historical because the heritage component is extremely
important. Again, I think that’s one of the neat things we did. That was part of the
design and part of the learning and part of the experience we wanted people to have when
they came to NCTC. If we could build a facility that was an exceptional training facility
but it wouldn’t speak to conservation if it was a sterile training facility. So this place
needed to speak to you while you were here, not by someone saying it to you, but by
you experiencing it every time you turned around. You turn around and you see a display
case and you see equipment that some innovative biologist developed in the 1950’s to
solve a problem they were facing and didn’t have the resources to go out and buy
something so they made something. It’s the same thing we’re doing today. People need
to see that. That’s a part of who we are. That’s a part of our culture. That’s a part of
our core values. That’s a part of what is expected of us a professionals in the FWS.
They need to see that. They need to see the face of the person that developed that thing,
and they need to see their name. It’s all a part of who we are. It’s a sense of pride and
motivation for people to realize what people did and the contributions that were made by
the people that came before us. There are some famous people like Rachel Carson, but
the vast majority of them are common folks that nobody had ever heard of and probably
no one, except for us will ever hear of again. But they were like us, common people who
shared an uncommon passion for conservation. They were going to find a way to get it
done. They were going to do it for the resource. They were going to do it for the critters
and they were going to save the dirt. And they would fine a way. It’s the same thing we
have to do today. All of that is part of the experience that we want people to leave
NCTC with. In a lot of ways, that experience is more important that the knowledge, the
policies that we are putting in their heads, but it all fits together.
DR. MADISON: You mention OTE before, one quick question is; how did we end up
with the name, National Conservation Training Center?
MR. LEMON: I don’t remember. It was originally NETC, the National Education and
Training Center. The idea being that the “education” was the education outreach; the
public education that we do here; the Division of Education Outreach, and then training.
I’m not sure who came up with that name. It could have been me, or somebody else, but
it was NETC for a long time. We decided, some of us decided, that maybe we should
have the word conservation in there someplace, or wildlife. So we started talking, and
throwing other names about. Conservation was the common theme. The great thing
about everything so far is that this was started in the first Bush administration and had
strong support. It went through the Clinton administration and had strong support. We
are in the second Bush’s administration with strong support. We hope that with the next
administration whoever that may be when they come in that we’ll have strong support.
We didn’t want it to be the National Environmental Training Center, because that has too
much baggage. Conservation is something that pretty much across the board, people can
buy into. We wanted ‘conservation’ in the name. We didn’t have to change the signs
because they weren’t already done but they were already in the drawings. It was NETC.
We went back and changed the name and came up with National Conservation Training
Center. We talked about ‘National Conservation Learning Center, but we thought that
that was just maybe a little bit too soft. We do training. Learning takes place in a lot of
different ways, but we do training. And we called it ‘training center’ so people would
understand that.
DR. MADISON: Last question. What would you recommend to somebody who was
setting out to build a training center, from your experience?
MR. LEMON: To somebody setting out to build a training center? Run! Think big.
Start with the end in mind. You need to be able to see what people are going to be doing
there. I’ll give you an example. When this facility opened, we walking out onto the patio
outside of Instructional West. It’s the patio that looks out at the long view down the
fields. As far as you can see it’s all NCTC property. It’s trees and it’s farm fields. I can
remember standing on that exact same spot before we started to build but we were
designing and just walking around the facility grounds. I said, “Okay, stand right here and
look this way. This is going to a patio, and FWS employees and other conservation
professionals are going to be in the building behind us in a classroom. They are going to
come out and grab a cup of coffee, and as quickly as they can they are going to go
outdoors. They are outdoor people. They are going to come out here and they are going
to stand on this patio. So we have to have a nice big patio here. They are going to look
down this long view and see these farm fields and trees, and stand under this sycamore
tree and they are going to hear the birds. They are going to say that this feels like home”.
So you need to see what it’s going to be. You need to be able to envision what it’s going
to be for a lot of reasons. One is so that you can design it, but two, so that you can sell it
to other people. So you can sell the vision to other people. So…think big, dream,
envision what it’s going to be and bring the partners to the table that you are going to
need. Not to get it built, but to operate it because that’s going to be the biggest struggle of
all. When times get tight having the support to keep this training center operating and to
keep the organization investing in putting people in airplanes and sending them here. You
need to get the people that will be making those decisions involved, up front, as you are
designing the place. Benchmark; go out and learn from other people’s mistakes and
successes. Don’t think that you have all of the answers. Go out and see what other
people did and learn from them. Ask a lot of questions. Have a good design team that is
interdisciplinary so that you have all views represented on the team. Listen to one
another but argue. We did a lot of arguing! Sometimes, the architects would just want to
“do it this way”. We’d say, “No!” and we’d argue, but we’d come to a better product.
At times we’d have to back off and say, “Okay, we may want it this way, but now that
we better understand what you’re saying we understand that we can’t do that; we can’t
get there from here. But, you need to understand who our customers are and we need to
make some changes.” It was an iterative process. It was not linear. But it worked very
well. I think that’s kind of what we would pass along to other folks.
DR. MADISON: Thank you very much Rick. This was a great interview!